Im a curr berk mfe student. There is a contingent of approx 10% of our class who has grown very bitter toward the program bc they couldn’t handle the workload & are now bitter that they don’t have jobs.
I’ll be honest: the program is VERY intensive. Most of the great programs are. If you can’t hack it, don’t come! You will get out of this program what you put into it. If you’re expecting to only work 40 hrs/wk, you won’t learn much & you won’t have a job coming out. if you’re ready for the 80 hrs/wk commitment, you’ll learn a LOT & will have great likelihood of having a great job!
Biggest selling points of berk mfe:
1) berk has WORLDWIDE reputation as being a leader in scientific & engineering disciplines, 2) program is housed in a top 10 bus school so after you graduate you’re part of a worldwide network of Haas bus school alumni,
3) BEST career services on the planet! Linda doesn’t ever sleep. She’s working 24/7 to find students positions. Think I’m kidding? Enroll & find out. you get emails from her with job openings at 3 am on Sunday mornings. Everyone who’s been here knows it’s true!,
4) diversity of curriculum: exposure to almost every asset class,
5) AMAZING professors. Seriously, rubinstein, tavella, leland, cox, kahn, stanton, wallace, jaffee. These are the names you read about in OTHERS’ textbooks, & the names the govt comes calling to help them in the current crisis! (sorry, previous reviewer, if the fact that our profs are constantly flying all over the globe to help domestic & foreign govts with the subprime crisis; I suppose that does make them slightly inaccessible. You’d rather have a group of classroom-bound professors??)
And re: this reviewer’s comments about textbooks: perhaps if he/she had bothered to open any of them, they would see that the texts were often nice additions to the lecture notes, that provided more in-depth discussions of certain topics (and, yes, we did use a pre-print edition for 1 text, in order to stay on the cutting edge. Yes, there were some typos. Sorry, you’d rather be at a school where courses are taught from 5 yr old texts??)
1 final comment: something to beware of, in both the Berkeley mfe AND any OTHER mfe program: if you go to a quant program expecting to be guaranteed a trading position... that’s risky. Everyone graduating from the berk MFE can get a QUANT position. that’s not a problem. There are a finite # of trading positions, however. Most people are fine with that. but if it’s gonna make you jealous to see some of your classmates get trading positions while you’re "stuck" in a quant role for a couple yrs, then you probably shouldn’t attend ANY mfe program.