(00:01):
When the course was first conceived, the university went out to employers in a wide range of different finance organisations and asked, what do you need in a fresh employee? Employers said: skills, we can train those later, but what we need is for the students to have underlying understanding of the paradigms that we use in order to tackle the markets. And this course has been designed to do exactly that

(00:30):
The biggest part of the cohort tries to break into investment banking into the top firms that we've all heard about.

(00:35):
A lot of people aim for private equity, consulting.

(00:38):
Hedge funds or quant trading shops.

(00:41):
I just got a message from one student from the first class, who's now a managing director at Goldman Sachs.

(00:47):
The MFEs are a very excited bunch of individuals. They're really ambitious about their careers and being able to bounce ideas off of them about career paths and where they want to go in the future is really amazing. And it's just a really rewarding experience to be surrounded by such high achieving go-getter type mentalities. It really teaches you that sky's the limit.

(01:10):
I think it's quite striking that when you study at Oxford, you get to know your teachers and then you do some research for a paper and suddenly your teachers' names appear all over those papers.

(01:21):
They're really the pioneers of their field. I mean, we're being taught by just the best; it's incomparable to anything I've experienced before.

(01:27):
These world class practitioners really just walk us through some of the case studies and the real life experiences that they've already had about how they advised some of the biggest blue chip names in the world through some of their biggest decisions.

(01:39):
So the finance lab is like masterclass for finance. We had someone from the head of leverage finance at Goldman teach us leverage finance. We had the head of restructuring from PJT teach us restructuring.

(01:49):
All my coursemates are very, very intelligent, ambitious people. And I think that's what makes this community great. If there's something you don't understand or something you wanna learn more about, you have so many people that will help you out

(02:03):
It was incredibly rewarding to, at the end of the programme, actually be able to write your own code and make it work. It was quite exciting, actually.

(02:11):
I think it's important to recognize that the MFE is a hard course. You have to put in work, but it is worth it. You learn things that'll give you an edge in whatever career you go on to do.

(02:20):
The deep understanding of statistics, asset pricing, economics, and finance. Those things can last for a career.

(02:29):
You'll really grow as a finance and economics professional. I can say that now, when I have conversations with industry professionals, I can speak to them at their level. And I can really provide insight based on fundamental economics principles.

(02:42):
Finance is a social science, and that means that most of the things we learn, they can disappear tomorrow and new things can come up. This programme shows you how little we actually know, and that to me is kind of the beauty. And if you're interested in that, then you should apply.