MIT Sloan Students Speak: MFin Class of 2012

Leaving NYC and Heading to Boston!

How is everyone?  So since I'm stuck inside during this so-called hurricane, I thought I'd write another blogpost to fill you all in on the rest of my summer. 

There was a little confusion with my first post and I'll clear that up now.  I went to MIT for undergrad, and if you do, you are allowed to skip the summer session classes as long as you did well enough in those classes when you took them as an undergrad.  Since I did well enough, I was able to do an internship at Morgan Stanley in Investment Banking instead of the summer session.  If anyone has more questions about that, I'd be happy to talk more about it. 

My internship at MS finished on August 12th, and I was lucky enough to receive an offer to return to the firm full-time next year.  I loved my experience at MS, and after I talk to a few of the other groups there I am excited to go back.  Having the pressure of trying to find a job off of my back is huge for my master's year, and it will allow me to take more classes outside of my core strengths without worrying too much about how my GPA will affect my job chances.  

As I mentioned in my last post, I worked in the financial institutions group, more commonly known as FIG.  FIG is one of the largest groups at MS, and the deals we worked on were some of the most high-profile and exciting ones on the Street.  Being able to open the Wall Street Journal and read about deals that I was personally working on was an incredible feeling. 

After my internship was over, I hung around New York City for a week hanging out with all the people I missed catching up with when I was working 110 hours a week.  Then, I came back up to Boston, and left for a cruise to Bermuda.  I had an incredible time on the cruise, from poker tournaments (we play a lot of poker at MIT), to just relaxing on the beach.  Thankfully, we had great weather and missed the hurricane completely.  One interesting tid-bit from Bermuda is that it is the center of the reinsurance industry.  In fact, reinsurance is also commonly known as Bermuda reinsurance.  So during my trip, where I was trying to unwind and forget about work, I was constantly reminded of all of the companies that I had done work for at MS! 

I'm finally back in Boston and settled into my new house on Commonwealth Avenue.  I'll finally get to meet the other MFins this week during the BBQ and I am incredibly excited.  As always, feel free to shoot me an email if you have anything specific you want answered in the blog.

Brief of MFin Summer Activities

Hello everyone!

Welcome again to our blog, I hope you have been doing well during the past few weeks. I believe that Rafael and Tong have described pretty well the academic part of our summer activities and I want to complement their posts with a small insight of the other non-academic sessions that are part of our summer term here at MIT:

-Career Preparation Sessions. At Sloan we have a Career Development Office fully dedicated to the MFin program, the mission of the office is to empower us to learn how to manage our career and conduct a successful job search. These are very interesting sessions that go from how to prepare to an interview, how to write our resume to business etiquette and a mock business reception.

-Quant Bootcamp. During this time we devote time to cover topics in mathematics and Matlab programming. We also review topics of optimization, statistics and probability.

-Business Communication Sessions. Time goes fast in these sessions, I find them very useful. Here we learn skills to deliver a successful presentation and to communicate our ideas in an effective way, not only in the spoken language but also in our gestures, posture and facial expression.

We'll have other activities in the days to come, I will keep you informed. In the last month, we have not only enjoyed the School's activities programmed during the summer term but have used our time to get to know the beautiful city of Boston. So far we have walked the freedom trail, gone to a Red Sox game (they had a victory over Kansas City!) and even tried the delicious lobster!

Below you can find some pictures of us:

As Tong mentioned, our classmates are truly amazing people. The more I get to know them the more I learn, it's incredible the willingness of people to share and listen to others.

Have a nice week and I'll keep you posted of future activities.

Bests,

Mid-summer recap

As we reach the second half of the summer term, let me share some of the experiences that so far have made these some of the most intense weeks of my life.

After orientation week, classes began at full speed. We started with Finance Theory I, a course designed to prepare students for the Fall course (Analytics of Finance). The classes cover an extensive amount of knowledge, from Arrow-Debreu securities to option pricing, from bond duration to equity valuation. Classes run everyday from 9:00am to 12:00, not including the highly recommended recitation from 4:00 to 5:30pm. The interval between classes and recitation, as said before, is dedicated to special events and career development. After the daily flood of information, we all need to work on problem sets (typically, one every other day). Working on problem sets is a fantastic opportunity to get to know some classmates better, make friends, learn from their different points of view and backgrounds and, of course, enjoy the state-of-the-art Sloan study and conference rooms. It is common to be up late most days of the week.

All this intense work converged to the midterm exam. Again, an endeavour that required considerable amounts of weekend study and discussions. The remaining hours of the exam day were the first free hours most of us had in a long time. To celebrate, many of us went to see the Red Sox match. For many, myself included, it was the first time watching a live baseball game. Wonderful experience! But our rest lasted only until the following morning, when the second part of Finance Theory I started, now focusing on corporate finance.

And now here we are, ready for another round of stimulating classes and demanding assignments!

Tchau!

Hi Everyone!

Hello Everyone,

This is Tong Chen from the M.Fin Class of 2012. As you have already read in the previous posts, summer term at Sloan is quite intense but exciting at the same time. I enjoy both the classes and career development events that our faculty and staff have put together with great effort and care. But if you ask me what I like the most, I would answer without hesitation that it is the people here.

As Jethro has already mentioned, our group started the summer term with a 4^th of July celebration, which was a fantastic way for us to meet each other. Everyone in our class is unique in their own way, whether it’s their personalities, their past experiences or their cultural backgrounds. Our admissions committee had done a great job in putting together a diverse but at the same time very cohesive group. This group of people, besides the learning experience, is what motivates me to stay up at one o’clock in the morning working on assignments and still be able to enjoy myself. 

Having a good time is one thing, but perhaps more importantly, we are able to share with each other an amazing wealth of experience and ideas. No matter what your interests are, whether it is IBD career development planning, current global economic events, playing checker, or simply watching a Formula One race on a Sunday morning, you can always find like-minded people in the class that you can have an interesting and educational conversation with on the subject.

My second biggest impression of the summer term is the challenging coursework. The pace is fast and the material is by no means easy to handle. But isn’t this exactly why you are coming to MIT – to learn from the best finance professors and pushed to achieve what you are truly capable of? The speed and the depth of the classes are by far the most intensive I have ever experienced, but one can be surprised by how much we actually learn at the end of the day. I cannot wait to see how much progress we could make by the end of the year.

There is so much I can talk about and I look forward to sharing more with you in my future posts. But altogether, I agree with the rest of us here that we are truly lucky to be doing something rewarding with equally amazing people. In my opinion, there just could not have been a better way to get started.

Tong