MIT Sloan Students Speak: MFin Class of 2012

M.Fin Farewell

So our time at MIT draws to a close. The M.Fin's time to maturity has finally come, but I am sure we all "expired" in-the-money. Actually, not expired. This is just the beginning of what I am sure will be 73 wonderful careers and lives. It was a fantastic year, definitely exceeding already very high expectations. Both challenging and rewarding, our time together resembled a geometric Brownian motion, with a large drift term of acquired knowledge and experiences, but also featuring a diffusion term of challenges and academic obstacles along the way.

 

Not only have we solidified our understanding of finance and real world problems, but also we have met amazing people and made fantastic friends. I know we will all go to very different places now, but friendship and technology allow us to have call options on our friends, the chance to keep in touch with very talented people from all over the globe.

 

Now we all change our measure, from the risk-neutral world of academics, to the physical world in which we can apply all the concepts we have learned and the thinking abilities we have developed in order to tackle meaningful problems. Changes of measure don't come easy, and life can be stochastic sometimes, but MIT has prepared us well to face the random walks we might encounter.

 

Life is not risk-free, and by the no-arbitrage principle, we cannot make it risk-free by dynamic replication. But we still can always find the best Sharpe ratio, and MIT has given us mean-variance optimization. Life is also not programmable, but MIT taught us how to debug a lot of it. Finishing our studies at MIT is both inspiring to acknowledge we can now represent it and humbling to know we will be expected to give continuity to MIT's long history of excelence.

 

As we move on to our careers, we shouldn't have the feeling of leaving MIT. We can now proudly say we have earned a look-back option on all experiences we have had. A perpetuity on MIT's incredible network. A convertible bond, from the indebted student life to the equity of our enhanced human capital. MIT will always be part of us.

 

Thank you very much, and good luck for the next M.Fins! 

Tchau!

Final's week and MFin Speaker Series

Hi everyone,

The program is almost over, I can't believe it! This year has gone incredibly fast... Officially this is MIT's week of finals but depending on the courses you take, you might have exams before or no finals at all. Some of MFins, like me, are already done with the program. My last exam was "Functional and Strategic Finance" with Prof. Merton, it was a three-hour comprehensive exam covering the material that we studied during the whole semester... quite interesting indeed!

Moving to a different topic, one thing I would like to tell you about the program is the opportunity to interact with and learn from industry experts about the topics that are part of their everyday work. You will have the opportunity to attend talks organized by the Dean's Office, the MFin Speaker Series Committee, the Investment Management Club, the Quantitative Finance Club and the Sloan Latin Club among many, many, many others... trust me I am NOT exaggerating!

During the past year, I was part of the MFin Speaker Series Committee which was comprised by 4 MFin students, the Program Directors and the Program Office. The objective of the Committee was to bring relevant speakers to the class, some of the guests I remember were: Don Tunnel (Wellington Management), Sebastien Page and Peter Matheos (PIMCO), Harry Mamaysky (Citi Principal Strategies), Ron Kahn (BlackRock), Stephen Mehos (Macquarie Capital) and Marc Freed (Lyster Watson). Many of them were MIT alumni and all of them were very happy to share their experiences to the attendants.

There is a lot to learn from them, they covered a broad range of topics going from "Building your Mean Variance Optimizer", "Innovations in Portfolio Risk Analytics", "The Changing Face of Investment Banking" to "Seven Quantitative Insights into Active Management". Furthermore, some of the guests were also happy to share some extra time to have lunch with us or stayed considerable more time after the talk to address questions related to their lecture, their careers, their companies and their life in general.

Finally, I just want to tell you that now that I have some free time I would be very happy to answer all the questions you might have. Just shoot me an email to rlazo@mit.edu

In the meantime I will take advantage of my last days in MA, this week I am going to Cape Cod with other fellow MFins :)

Have a nice week!

Cheers,