Success Stories: Berkeley Masters in Financial Engineering
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Please see below for a sample paragraph in a successful essay to Berkeley's MFE program.
To become fully successful out of a MFE program, innovation is surely to be one of the hallmarks of successful financial practitioners. Innovation and creativity have always been crucial components in my research activities. I participated in my first research project during the second summer vocation at the university, which resulted into a research article on testing for homogeneity in beta mixture models, published by Communication in Statistics in 2014. Through this experience, I learnt to conduct theoretical analysis and Monte Caro simulations, implement statistical algorithms using computer programs, and present research outcomes in a proper manner. I was thus inspired to continue exploring new areas in the statistical realm. For example, I used extreme value theory, ubiquitous in the field of financial risk management, to study extreme weather events. I proposed to estimate and diagnose the financial time series models by robust methods such as quantile and least-absolute-deviation methods, instead of the least-square or maximum-likelihood estimation, which are sensitive to distributional assumptions and outliers. Moreover, my current and previous professional work are all highly quantitative and require huge investment in reading papers and searching for new ideas, in order to formulate problems into statistical models. This is vital for me as a quantitative researcher working in a highly competitive hedge fund. I am currently investigating independent component analysis for processing financial series. The ideas were borrowed from blind source separation problems for signal processing.
