Please evaluate my profile.
All:
Please tell me if I am competitive in applying to the following, since I've been preparing for this for a long time.
Age: 23
Target Schools:
NYU, NYU-Poly, Princeton, Baruch, Columbia, Fordham, Rutgers, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley, and Cornell.
Programs: MSFE or M.Fin where applicable.
Profile:
Majors: Mathematics and Economics
GPA in Majors: 4.0 in the United States after I transferred here from a top university in Brazil 2 years ago. I'm in a big, but relatively unknown, state school here in the US.
GPA Overall: 3.8. Graduating Magna cum Laude.
GPA in Brazil for Economics (my only major there): 2.8-3.0 - Grading is different back there.
GRE: 800Q/600V
However, in order to boost my application, due to my GPA in Brazil, I'll be taking the GRE Mathematics Subject Exam. If practice exams are a good measure on how I'll do on the exam, I'll be above the 90% Percentile.
I've taken all Mathematics classes, obviously. My grades are good. I've mostly been a math major since arriving in the US, and have aced all my courses, including ODEs, PDEs, Analysis, and Real Analysis.
I've taken a programming course in
C++, I know how to program in C# and I'm currently working on a Risk management software for Forex Trading (I will not specify the name here, since I don't think it is appropriate). I've also created, marketed and then sold a Forex automated trading strategy (algo trading software, but only the strategy and the software to use it on), and I later sold my company to a Japanese-American investor.
Letters of Recommendation:
Great letters of recommendation, two from my professors, one from the undergraduate mathematics department director, and one from a hedge-fund manager.
I have 6 months of experience working as an arbitrage analyst in a hedge-fund. I did mostly risk-arbitrage and corporate structure arbitrage, but I did look at some convertibles during the period. I was let go due to the financial crisis, and the fund losing over half of its NAV, since I was only an intern.
Extra courses, seminars and workshops in the area:
1) Mathematics and Finance: From Theory to Practice - Brazilian institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (2006 and one day in 2007). Organized by Marco Avellaneda (Courant Institute), Bruno Dupire (Bloomberg and Courant Institute) and Jorge Zubelli.
Speakers included Bruno Dupire and Peter Carr. They spoke on Volatility Modeling and the link between Sovereign CDS and Currency Options, respectively. These are the talks I remember the best, though. Jim Gatheral from Baruch did speak one year, I can't remember which, and I don't think I saw it.
2) Brazilian Mercantile Exchange Institute - It is a learning institute backed by the Brazilian Mercantile Exchange, as the name says.
a) Derivatives Pricing Training
A 144-hour (48 meetings) course, with three exams, where I learned how to price derivatives from simple index futures to credit default swaps.
b) Risk Management
A 171-hour course, three exams as well. We learned everything around the VaR framework, and had an incredible amount of classes on position mapping, from variable to fixed income. This includes looking at volatility surfaces, spread over treasuries and modeling of default risk, and so on.
Other:
Coming from Brazil, I have the unique opportunity to give insight into the Brazilian markets to future employers. And seeing that Brazil is one of the economic powers of the 21st century, and given my background in both economics and mathematics, I'm in a prime position to analyze and understand markets that may be out of reach for other applicants.
Furthermore, I'm fluent in 3 languages: English, Portuguese, and Spanish. And I can communicate in Italian, Russian and French as well, however, I wouldn't be able to read an academic paper on any of these, since I only have conversational practice (things like ordering food, giving directions, small-talk).
Last but not least, I'm incredibly motivated, and I have in my bookshelf: Neftci's Financial Engineering and An Introduction to the Mathematics of Financial Derivatives, Jarrow's Modeling Fixed-Income Securities and Interest Rate Options, Joshi's The Concepts and Practice of Mathematical Finance, Paul WIlmott's Introduction to Quantitative Finance and Hull's book, even though the last one I only used for the first course from the BME. All of these I have studied prior to coming to the US, either before my internship or during it. I also have several books on measurement in economics, econometrics, probability and statistics, mathematics, but I don't think these are relevant.
Please let me know if I will be able to secure at least some admits this season. I'm extremely worried about being rejected all across the board, since there is nothing I want more than to learn more about financial engineering, and getting into a great school.