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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GoIllini" data-source="post: 121008" data-attributes="member: 2252">Hi Lisa.>does recommendations greatly influence the result just like in PhD applications?I honestly don't know much more than you do about this.  I can tell you that Princeton MFin is somewhere between a Finance PhD program and an MBA program, and that in both cases, recs matter big time.  I think you need three very strong recs. (not necessarily claiming that you are God's gift to the quant world, but very strong and very supportive)Recs should be able to speak to your quantitative ability.  My three all came from industry, but two of them were from PhDs in quant roles.  The third was from my manager (a programmer with a STEM undergrad) who sat in a trade strategy role at a bank.  So all three of them were qualified by MFE standards to talk about my ability to do calculus, linear algebra, probability, etc etc.If you can get a GRE.Q over 165, three strong recs, and you either work in the front office or a quant MO role at a bank, or if you have done ~2 standard deviations above the median in a top 20-30 undergrad STEM program, or if you have done 1 standard deviation above the median in a top 5 undergrad STEM program, I think you stand a better-than average chance at admission.  (However the average chance is about 5-7%).  It is worth the $90 application fee and ~10-20 hours of time in completing the application.Depending on your background and industry experience, I may be able to increase those odds to 50%.  However, when you are trying to cull 800 well-qualified applications down to 40 admits, the final cut from ~100 down to 40 can get awfully random.  In some ways, it really does come down to luck.  I don't think the true admit rate at Princeton- or any undergraduate or professional MS program- really gets below about 10%, and I don't think you can read much into a rejection from Princeton other than the fact that you did not have amazing luck in this particular round.  We reject more amazing people than we admit, and those people go on to have more amazing careers than many of our students.But it's still worth the lottery ticket.</blockquote>

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