How to Get Accepted to Berkeley Haas’ Amazing Master of Financial Engineering Program

Are you looking for a highly respective quantitative program that will prepare you for a career in the most demanding, analytical, and data-driven areas of financial services? Today’s guest, Jacob Gallice, Executive Director of Berkeley Haas Master in Financial Engineering program, shares what it takes to get accepted to this highly competitive program. Welcome to the 540th episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Thanks for joining me. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to mention a resource at Accepted that can help you prepare your statement of purpose to a Master in Financial Engineering program as well as the other graduate programs. Download 5 Fatal Flaws to Avoid in Your Grad School Statement of Purpose to learn how to avoid the five most common mistakes we see in grad school statements of purpose, as well as tips on how to write a statement of purpose that makes your story memorable and highlights your qualifications for your target graduate program.Our guest today is Jacob Gallice, Executive Director at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business’ Master of Financial Engineering. Jacob earned his bachelor's at Binghamton University and his MBA at NYU Stern. He has worked for Goldman Sachs and Heidrick & Struggles in the financial services world. In 2017, he pivoted to admissions as Associate Director and then Senior Associate Director of Admissions at NYU Stern before deciding he preferred west coast weather and moving to Berkeley in 2021, first as Program Director of the MFE, then he became Executive Director of the MFE in March 2023. So I can still, I think, congratulate you on your promotion, right? Still within 12 months. [1:56]Sure. Thanks.Congratulations, Jacob, and welcome to Admissions Straight Talk. [2:02]Happy to be here.Now let's start with a really basic question. What is the Master in Financial Engineering program at Berkeley Haas, and what does it prepare one to do? [2:06]Excellent question. A financial engineering degree is a specialized master's degree here that prepares one to enter the field of quantitative finance and more largely, can prepare someone to enter the fields of financial technology, namely in roles such as data science, machine learning. But largely speaking, what we're talking about here are individuals who are interested in the intersection of technology and finance and working within the ecosystem of what we kind of call the niche field of quant finance.Can you provide an overview of both the full-time and the part-time options at the MFE program and roughly how many students participate in each of the programs? [2:48]I can indeed. So we enroll about 80 students in our flagship full-time program. We're one of the only programs out there in the market that is a one-year or 12-month program. So the program is intensive, it's immersive, but it prepares students very well to enter and break into this field. So that is the one-year program. We can certainly get into that a little bit more in due course.I contrast that with the part-time program, which gives students the flexibility to do their studies over a two- to three-year period, and it's a much more small specialized cohort. Typically you're looking at roughly 7 to 10 students in that cohort. It's really designed for working professionals who are simply looking to augment their education, their studies, and apply that real world knowledge directly on the job. So we started that program a few years ago to sort of allow those students who otherwise did not feel it was necessary to leave their job, but still wanted to tap into the gr

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