Sounds like you want to be a financial analyst in banking or asset management since you got the CFA 1 and 2.
When I think financial analyst, I think either corporate financial analyst (working with accounting, budgets, variance analysis, strategy, projections) or I think of equity research analyst in IBank (those guys that write the reports and have Buy or Sell recommendations) or in asset management, like Telecom sector analyst at Fidelity.
To do any of these things, IMO it would be easier to get these jobs with an MBA focused in finance along with your CFA.
If you're gonna just be a corporate financial analyst in a regular company, it would be better to get the CPA since you are on a track to becoming the controller, vp of finance, or CFO.
For either of these jobs, the MFE is irrelevant because that kind of stuff you will hardly use unless you go into a quantitative asset manager where you have to design excel spreadsheets that shows a universe of stocks that have a buy/sell indicator based on certain triggers it hits.
But this kind of stuff you can learn how to do buy taking the high level econometric classes in MBA and some VBA Excel courses at a community college.
Lastly, you being a woman, you have an easier chance at gaining acceptance, especially to MBA's because companies want to hire more woman for upper level management. It could be the same for the MFE's as well, but I'm not sure.
If you still want to do the MFE, you should take Numerical Analysis, Real Analysis, Calc 3,
C++ Programming, ODE, and PDE to make your profile competitive with the rest.
As the market stands right now, there are way more opportunities for MBA's that have a CPA or CFA than MFE's. Way more.
Although everyone always talks about the transition of finance going into pure quant stuff where everything is automated and programmed, I still think that is gonna be like 20 years down the line.
There are way more jobs that ask for MBA/CPA than a CFE. The only problem is that there are also a ton of people that have MBA/CPA and now even CFA. In places like NYC there are also a ton of MFE's as well.
It is all relative, but no doubt the pool of CFE's are growing every day while the number of jobs have been shrinking the last year. By next year, that pool is again going to increase by like 25% with the number of new grads. Yet I doubt the number of jobs will increase by that much.
Until other mainstream companies start picking up on the value of MFE's, I think MFE's are sort of in trouble.
You can tell by the job placement data for most programs. Unless you're in the best of the best programs, it appears more or less that a little bit of half the class gets a job upon graduation at the average MFE program. Contrast this to the MBA program. Their percentage points in job placement are all close to 75% roughly if not more for all of the top 30 programs upon graduation..
The bottom MFE programs, I don't even think those guys get jobs. They graduate with no offer and have to spend like 6 months to go find something. In the meantime, they are in 50K debt.
The business world is just not quantitative enough and not advanced enough in practices to accomodate MFE's at the moment, and the real world where they are needed, the Wall, well they are in the toilet right now and might be for another year or maybe going to be in a cyclical bear market for the next 4 years, who knows.
