University of California, Los Angeles - Master of Financial Engineering

One thing that really frustrates me about UCLA MFE Class of 2024 is the obsession with GPA. People spend so much time grinding through course materials—even when they’re not relevant to job interviews or real-world skills. The second quarter is already intense, with everything graded on a curve, but the focus feels completely misplaced.

If you’re serious about landing a full-time job in the U.S., GPA is not the key. What really matters is U.S. internship experience, technical skills, and networking(feedback and referral). I’ve spoken with many industry professionals—some UCLA alums, some complete strangers—and the advice is always consistent: invest your time in gaining experience and preparing for interviews. No one cares about your GPA as long as you don’t fail. You don't need to include your GPA on resume.

Don’t count on career services to carry you. You have to take initiative—network actively, get feedback from people in the industry, and do mock interviews with peers (which is surprisingly hard to arrange because everyone’s busy studying) and experienced mentors.

Honestly, this GPA obsession is exactly why our class has such a low placement rate. People are optimizing for the wrong metric.

Although we had great professors and excellent classmates, there was no 6-month AFP (Graduate Project) and no help from summer interns. We only had one week of AFP, which was the week before graduation. Employment is extremely bad as you might see from the official website. As long as you are accepted by the school from the east coast, do not consider UCLA MFE.

Just graduated last December, working in asset management now. UCLA MFE is definitely a good program. The courses covers everything you should know for quantitative finance. Definitely comprehensive knowledge and top-class professors! The only downside might be the homework, which make my life during job search a bit more stressful (because need to take care of both side). Career service is nice, I always learn sth from my conversation with Amber. Resume book sending out to employers is very helpful, I actually got my internship through resume book. Alums are helpful and nice, most of them are willing to connect and share their experiences! Our opportunities is not limited to west coast, there are a bunch of people from my class working in NY or Chicago as well.

As a nerd focusing on techniques and taking courses, UCLA's MFE brings me a different experience, reshaping my mind. Students in this program usually come from very different backgrounds. And we are required to finish almost all the coursework as a study group. In the process, I realized my advantages and learned how to work with people from different backgrounds. Such practice is helpful since it simulates the real working environment in financial institutions.

The career office provides guidelines for job searches and many networking events. They hold workshops regularly to give suggestions based on students' personal experiences in job searching. They also build a brand in the financial industry, which enables me to find my internship and current job. Although they don't appear in the referral directly, I can feel the connection during the interviews.

To be honest, without much finance background, it's hard for me to maintain GPA in a fast-paced program, search for internships/full-time jobs, and participate in many networking events at the same time. In the short 15 months, I made many mistakes and wanted to give up switching to the financial industry. However, gradually, I am more confident to face the difficulty. I owned it to my friends in the class and the good suggestions from them, alumni, and the career office. Compared with before, I already became a person with the confidence to solve all kinds of problems at work. In the end, I want to say, even though the whole process is somewhat suffering, you can gain what you want.

Some background: I just graduated in December, I had no finance background before the MFE program, and I’m a social person.

UCLA’s MFE program was my first choice when I was filling out applications and I’m convinced it’s still the best spot for quantitative people who also understand that having fun outside of class is important. My classmates were so much fun and are super smart. We had parties every week and became great friends. I doubt you’ll see the same level camaraderie at Berkeley, and I’ll bet anything you won’t see it at Baruch.

The program takes you from 0 to 100, giving you everything you need to enter the finance industry with a solid job. I just signed my full time offer letter and will be making 3x what I was making 18 months ago. The MFE staff/team is very responsive and they put in a lot of effort. Most of them have been there only a couple of years and have made great changes to the program (e.g. moving away from R to exclusively Python, getting more interaction with other programs in the business school, etc.).

You’re not going to leave this program an expert in any one field, nor should you expect to. Instead, you will leave with foundational knowledge in many fields that quants are typically interested in (ABS, equities, options, risk mgmt, ABS, data science, etc.). If you can handle a tough workload, learn fast, and work well with others, it doesn’t get much better than this. And when you’re done with class, you walk onto one of the most beautiful college campuses in the world with a bright, sunny day.

Good luck!

Class of 2023.

It seems like a money grab by the business school. Tuition too high for what we are getting.

Professors are just here to to the minimum work.

Forget about any support if you go to their cabin with any doubts after class.

Some are so stupid that don't even record the session that is on zoom. Eg QIPS. Cheating on exams is rampant.

Admin is so happy with the substandard ranking and will boast about it everywhere.

Attending the UCLA MFE program was one of the best decisions I’ve made.

In terms of academics, you'll be learning from highly regarded professors: Rossi, Longstaff, Chernov, Lochstoer (just to name a few), who are top-notch in industry and research.

In terms of structure: the 10-week quarters go by very quickly. Classes start with the basics, but pick up fast. I recommend getting good at R as you'll be doing a lot of your HW with it.

Career services: you'll receive regular emails for internships/jobs and you'll meet with the MFE career services staff to go over interview topics/questions you may have. Leanna, Olga, and Amber are a delight to work with!

Overall, it’s a great program. The coursework can get heavy at times. But the professors and staff are invested in their students’ success and want to see them succeed. And the weather in LA isn’t too bad either!

A great program, especially for someone without a rich quantitative background. I had a traditional finance background (wealth management) and gained many quantitative skills throughout the program (although it was a challenging program given my lack of quantitative skills). Had a challenging time finding a summer internship due to my lack of quantitative experience. However, I was able to land a quantitative job upon graduation. Most alumni I reached out to through LinkedIn were very friendly and helpful and some of them even offered to refer me to their company.

2014 Graduate.
Easily the most valuable year+ of my life.
Professors and coursework align on learning skills that can be applied directly to the industry. Support staff is incredible, with a strong focus on ensuring you will have multiple job offers by the end of the program. Peers in the program are talented and driven. I still stay in close contact with several people from my cohort. Highly recommended!

A great program that teaches you theoretical knowledge and gives you applied opportunities. Amazing industry partners for the AFP project. A truly dedicated career office that is focused on providing tech skills, interviews, and resume workshops.

Curriculum:
This program would teach you all the fundamentals you need to succeed in the quant finance field with world-class faculties. I personally liked the courses for their nice balance between finance, coding, and mathematics. The first two quarters build up your fundamentals in finance and more, and the third quarter takes you deeper into different fields such as asset management, data science, pricing and valuation, risk and management, etc, where you may discover your skills and passion. The courses mostly use Python, with some using R, but there is no class that specifically teaches you how to code, which is something I strongly suggest adding. You will have to figure it out yourself and go deeper if you want to ace those coding interviews. There is also an applied finance project that gives you a sneak peek of what problems the industries are trying to solve. Depending on the company, you might be solving the most difficult or weirdest problems, but it would be fruitful and fun if you step up and see the project through.

Career:
The career service team is great and proactive. They help with behavioral/ technical interviews, resume/ CL, webinars to help you understand the industry, salary negotiation, etc. They also have connections to many companies that sometimes directly hire from the program (I got my internship this way). They also still keep in touch with me even though I already graduated.

Overall I really recommend this program. It helped me transition from a pure finance background to landing a quant research role. The program gives you everything you need and more, the rest is up to you. I also want to add that most students here are pretty laid back and you will probably meet the smartest and most accomplished students here.

Awesome experience.

Education:
Excellent faculties with great knowledge. Teaching is mainly application based, So it is good for people with little less math background.
Concepts are explained in both ways mathematical and Economical.

Career:
Career service is excellent. Strong Alumni network. You can choose from many different career paths.

Great place. The classes are very practical and applicable-for me, I found the Derivatives Market and Computational Finance class most useful; the only caveat is the Quant Asset Management, as the professor does not teach the class in an easy-to-understand way. In terms of workloads, the Spring Quarter is going to be the heaviest, but that’s how you learn the practical staff. There are also a lot of helpful job searching resources-for instance, the workshops on quant interview and R/Python. In addition, the alumni network is also valuable-I find both my internship and full-time job thanks to its help!

All Faculties are world-class, Anderson is also prestigious and owns great resources and industry connections. The course is well-structured and provides practical projects align with the materials. Also, the program are heavily focus on students, any voice from student will be seriously considered and provide supports. You can see the program is trying to be better in every aspect. All in all, it's a great program and provides competitive edges for students to further their careers.

I am an alumni from the 2017 batch.

Faculty:
As it has been mentioned before, the faculty is top notch. Profs Longstaff, Ivo Welch, Lars Lochstoer, Peter Rossi are world class professors.

Structure:
It's a very packed degree, with a lot of things to digest in very little time + a summer internship. In my opinion, it's easier to absorb all the knowledge with previous experience either in finance, math or coding. Probably 2 out of the 3 would be enough to have a strong experience in the program.

Support system:
There is a good infrastructure around you. Industry professionals are invited to speak every week or so, you get mock interview sessions, resume preparation sessions, quantitative interview preparation sessions, networking events and so on. I've stayed in touch with the MFE Office and always received all the support I've needed.

For some of the students (me included), learning to connect and network takes some time, and it's hard to do this while staying afloat in your coursework. It's a very demanding 15 months but it's an experience I would definitely recommend!

Faculty:

The professors and faculty are world class. From Peter Rossi, to Francis Longstaff, to Ivo Welch, I've never had the privilege of learning from a more accomplished and well-respected group of people. The level of care they put into each of their lectures was abundantly clear and was leagues above what I experienced at my undergraduate university. They were easy to chat with, always accommodated time after class for additional questions, and, in my opinion, the main reason someone should attend UCLA's MFE program.


Coursework:

The coursework was expansive and quite rigorous. However, there is simply too much information to try and squeeze into a 15 month program. As a result of this squeeze, you feel like you're trying to drink from a fire hose. The flip side of this is that you get excellent exposure to a bunch of different subject areas in quantitative finance and, if you didn't truly have enough time to learn it the first time, you have the tools/materials/means to review it later.


Career Services:

A lot of the posts here are being hard on the MFE's career services, in my opinion. While it took me a nerve-wracking amount of time to obtain my summer internship (got my offer in late March), this wasn't because of a lack of opportunity. I must have had six or seven opportunities before winter break and I simply didn't perform in my interviews. While these were very competitive positions (Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, etc), it's not the career services' fault that I fell short. I suppose I could say that I wasn't properly prepared to interview but that falls more on myself than the MFE program. A counselor can only take you so far before you have to take responsibility for your own career.


MFE Office / Administration:

I can't thank the lovely ladies in the MFE office enough. Leanna and Elisa were always there to listen to my grievances, help me with petty (and major) problems, and guide me through the program. The amount of students, current and prospective, they have to manage is astounding and they each deserve a raise for all the work they put in.


- Class of 2019 -

Having completed an year in the program, I believe that I am now in a position to give an objective feedback. I will address each of the quarters in the program separately.

My background:
Undergraduate form one of the top engineering institutions in India, and with cumulative work experiences of three years in a BB and asset management.

Quarter 1: This quarter has "four building blocks" of our program: Financial Accounting, Econometrics, Stochastic Calculus, Investments.
Financial Accounting: This focuses on the fundamentals of reading (just reading) the financial statements of companies. The course did not, at any moment ,focus on the relevance of each of the concepts in valuation. I finished this course with the hope that the "Financial Decision making"(Corporate finance named fancily) would cover these. More on this later.

Investments: This course is taught by Prof. Chernov and the concepts covered key concepts involving valuation of financial market products, and the theory of asset allocation. The subject was taught well and the assignments were well designed to facilitate learning.

Stochastic Calculus: The course is taught by Prof Panageas, who teaches so well that a person with no background in advanced calculus or probability can get it. The assignments in this course were well designed to reinforce concepts dealt with in class. This course is however introductory only.

Econometrics: Professor Rossi is an excellent teacher and is an expert in this subject. However, I personally felt that this curriculum was similar to that of a STAT 101 course and more content can be included in the curriculum. Devoting 6 lectures (18 hours) to linear regression is definitely overkill.

Quarter 2:

Empirical Methods in Finance: This course builds upon our fundamental Econometrics course, and a large chunk of it was modelling of time series. This course was a good refresher for me, and professor Lars did an excellent job teaching it.

Derivatives: The course is extremely basic and is not a MFE level course at all. The curriculum is best suited for MBAs, and not suitable for someone who looks to trade/price these securities. Out of the 10 lectures, NONE of them was new to me, or to anyone who has attended the first quarter.

Fixed Income markets: This course is taught by professor Longstaff and is the best course of the lot. The course builds a good understanding the fixed income products and their pricing. Professor Longstaff has tremendous experience and does an excellent job in giving the right intuition. The homeworks are realistic and extremely well structured.

Corporate finance: This course was taught with a lot of animation and the classes were indeed a good break. The course however, like accounting, was poorly structured to meet the needs of an MFE.

Quarter 3:

Financial Risk Management: This course was taught very well by Prof. Haddad and the homework assignments were interesting and exciting too.

Quantitative Asset Management: This is the worst course in the curriculum and a complete misnomer. The course, like derivatives just repeats content and the homework assignments were even more pointless (at least that wasn't the case in derivatives). The outcome of this course is just frustration and not a solid understanding of portfolio management.

Data Analytics/Machine learning: Taught by professor Lars. Although the course is taught well, and there is zero redundancy, it speaks little on application of machine learning techniques to solve real problems and is just unfortunately just involves using basic R packages to "small data".

Computational Methods in Finance: Focuses on implementation of Monte carlo and other numerical techniques to derivative pricing. It is just a repeat, that develops little understanding of the techniques. The homework assignments were redundant and just served to induce boredom.

Other important aspects:

Co-students: A large chunk of students in the class have absolutely no quantiative background, to the extent that they haven't even heard of "Matrices", get intimidated by seeing the "integral" symbol, do not understand conditional probability even after completing two quarters, and have poor programming skills. Most of them are straight out of undergrad. Although the program offers a paltry introductory math course, I believe this course doesn't serve to improve their understanding.

The review below that strongly advocates for using "Accounting" and "Fama Macbeth regressions" to build trading strategies only serves to demonstrate that people are just unaware of the difference between: expectation and average & attribution and trading. I admire your confidence in betting and LOLing people.

Homeworks: While the majority of assignments are good, some are simply redundant and repetitive. In my opinion, these homeworks should be scrapped. Also, there must be a strong restriction placed on using libraries in homeworks (which defeats the purpose).

Exams: They are just too easy and I actually experience that my undergraduate exams were way harder. The program should acknowledge that correct grading, and a necessary spread in scores are important to enhance the credibility of your grades.

Career services: You are pretty much on your own.

I’m proud to be the UCLA Anderson MFE alumni.
I would not trade my MFE experience @ UCLA for anything else, and let me tell you why:
(1)well structured classes. From basics to extremely complex concepts - everything will be covered. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to test your knowledge working on various problem-sets. It’s laughable to read complaints about Fama-MacBeth and Accounting below. I’d bet those folks just never built a single trading strategy.
(2)team work. Significant part of home assignments are done in small groups. This allows exchange thoughts with peers, improve understanding of material (incl. Fama-MacBeth;) ), and strengthen soft skills that most quants are missing.
(3)ability to provide constructive feedback and be heard. If something is not right, just let administration know. They are there for you to help and make things right. Never hesitate to schedule a meeting with the program’s Executive Director or Career Advisor to discuss suggestions, go through your resume, practice answering interview questions or get advice on job/internship search process.

I’m thankful for help and endless support of members of faculty and administration.
It’s a true honor for me to be part of strong and successful UCLA Anderson MFE family!

Irina (Class of 2017)

I am a UCLA Anderson Alumni from the MFE program class of 2016. Overall the program was stellar. Excellent professors and great guidance for our careers. We had industry professionals come give talks on a weekly basis. The staff was great as well. Elisa Dunn — the Executive Director of the MFE Program — was extremely helpful in assisting me to learn about various industries, develop my career and get a feel for the quant industry as a whole. Leanna Cortez — the Associate Director of the MFE Program — was also excellent in guiding the program and coursework. All the staff were professional and there to help. The professors were phenomenal. A lot of them have invented the knowledge they were teaching and were super clear and concise. In terms of landing a job, some people think that the career services should hand them a job. But that's not how it works. They were there to give the students opportunities and it was always up to the student to take advantage of those opportunities. I do agree with other posts with respect to Python over R and I think this is one of the parts in the MFE program that they definitely need to change. When I graduated companies only wanted Python and not R. It really helped to understand the theory and having gained the ability to program helped too. There is no way I could have gotten to where I am today without having this experience on my resume and learning the skills that were taught during the program. Highly recommend this program to advance your career and get into the company of your dreams.
Jason C. Mercurio

As a recent graduate of the UCLA MFE program, I came across the previous review and thought the need to chime into the discussion.

The executive director and career service can help you only as much as you want to help yourself. You have to work hard to be ready for interviews to get the job. Of course it doesn't help if the executive director doesn't put her head into the game, that shouldn't be the reason you like or don't like the program.

UCLA Anderson is a prestigious school, the professors here are the best in this country. I truly appreciate the time here in Anderson and I have learnt a lot from the professors, especially professor Lars who guided our Final Year Project.

For those who have learnt quantitative finance/math/stats, you would probably feel this program is too easy, but I have definitely picked up new knowledge and skill set. I would highly recommend the program to those who want a change of career into finance.

There are a lot of things you need to learn outside the curriculum to be able to get a job, thats just the reality unfortunately. So you shouldn't expect to be able to find a job very easily upon entering the program, especially when the career service is not helping much.

Long story short, great place to learn, but you are very much on your own when you are on job hunting, which I would say that it is not a completely bad experience, because you can probably find better job opportunity than the career service can find it for you.

Just my 2 cents