Cambridge Master of Finance curriculum

Cambridge Judge Business School’s Master of Finance, MFin, programme was launched in 2008. It has a unique niche in business education, is one of a select few MFin degrees in which 100% of each student intake has professional experience in finance, and teaching is delivered by experienced finance practitioners, as well as leading academics.

The key message behind the MFin is really to blend theory and practice. So we are an academically rigorous programme, and we do cover the foundational elements of finance or the theory of finance at the outset of the programme, largely by way of a range of core courses that are compulsory for all students to take. And that’s really to put the students as far as we can on a level playing field in terms of their understanding of the core building blocks of the theory of finance.

The second half of the course is more hands-on and is more applied finance and is largely driven by practitioner teaching. And that’s where the students can actually tailor the programme to their areas of interest and the areas that they potentially want to go into post-MFin. So students, to complete the degree, would need to take a minimum of seven elective courses from a range of over 20 courses. So there’s quite a lot of choice there.

And we cover courses across the finance spectrum. So there are courses on investment management, on mergers and acquisitions, on private equity, venture capital, a whole range of different questions. It really depends on what the students want to get out of the programme.

So our range of prior years of work experience in terms of the class go from two to 13, 14. This year, we have someone with 25 years’ experience. So everyone comes in with different aspirations, and it really depends what they’re looking to get out of the programme.

In my case, I had about 11 years experience when I did the MFin, and I was really looking to consolidate my knowledge and experience in the industry and to fill in some knowledge gaps, because finance is a very broad area and can tend to be quite siloed. So it was really to help me break down through those silos a little bit. So I took a range of courses across the finance spectrum. Other students may wish to take courses that are very focused on a specific area, let’s say asset management or investment banking.

Another element of the programme are the projects. We have two of them. One of them runs over the Christmas break, and that’s an equity research project. It’s largely a valuation exercise where the students take a view on a stock. They come up with a buy or sell recommendation.

They write a piece of equity research that goes along with it. And they do a presentation, which is almost like a morning call type presentation, so very short, and pitch to the panel. And then there’s a Q&A to follow.

Over the Easter break, we have a very exciting project called the Group Consulting Project, where students work with an external company, financial institution, hedge fund, boutique, advisory firm, for example, on a real-life business issue that the company is facing. So it may be a market sizing or market research type exercise. It may be a portfolio optimization exercise. And they spend a month working very closely with the company. And the final deliverable on that is a presentation, which is usually attended by senior management within those companies.

How has the programme developed over the last five years? It started in 2008, so as that development process, what’s changed?

I think the core part of the programme is very well-established now. So the core courses and the range of electives is pretty robust and has been in place. We always look at broadening out our elective offering by introducing new areas and inviting people to come in to talk about recent developments in the market.

The real growth has been really in terms of our ability to engage with a broader set of speakers, so bringing in speakers from areas that perhaps we hadn’t covered in the past, also broadening out a range of group consulting projects. We do have a lot more international projects now in our portfolio. And the other big growth area has been in terms of leveraging the alumni network.

So naturally as we grow every year and we add on more students and intern more alums, there’s been a lot more engagement with the alumni community, both the MFin alumni community, which has now grown to over 170 and across 35 different countries, to casting a wider net in terms of engaging with wider universities, so Cambridge University alumni in the finance space.

I mean, the Judge Business School is a fairly young institution, but Cambridge University has been around for over 800 years. And there are very senior bankers, financiers out in the industry who have studied in Cambridge many years ago who have a lot of goodwill and do want to give back to the University.

So we have tried to engage a lot more with some of these individuals and to bring them in to speak to students, whether it’s on our City Speaker Series, or as practitioners within some of the electives, or just in terms of some ad hoc careers-driven sessions where they come and share their experience and how they got to where they are now in the industry and sharing some of the insights in terms of the skill sets that they look for, for example, when they’re recruiting talent into their areas.

Do you have a message for students actually taking the MFin at the moment? And do you have a message for prospective applicants?

I think for the students who are currently taking the MFin, it’s only one year. It goes really fast. And the key thing is the network that you take away with you. Leverage all the connections you can make. Do speak to the practitioners. Do speak to the city speakers. They are a fountain of knowledge.

And like I said, there’s a huge amount of goodwill. They’re very open to sharing their insights in terms of their own career progression, in terms of developments in the industry, in terms of what skills are actually required to get from A to B to get into your area of interest to satisfy your career aspirations. So that’s one of the key things.

In terms of future applicants, I would definitely suggest that they speak to us. There’s lots of ways that they can engage with us during the application stage. We are leveraging our alumni network hugely now. We have a alumni outreach function on our website, where they can actually contact alums in various geographies from different areas of banking and talk to them about their own experience of the programme.

We have regular monthly web chats as well, where you can get hands-on advice in terms of the application process. I’m here. I’ve been through the programme myself. I’d be more than happy for people to contact me directly.

We do have a great range of information on our website. We do have student videos on there as well, where we get students to share their perspectives about their favourite aspects of the programmes, to talk a little bit more about their experience of the Group Consulting Project, the City Speaker Series. We do have lots of clips from City Speakers on there as well. So I would definitely suggest that future applicants do look at all of that, because that will give them a good overview of what the programme is really about.

Another key element is our personal and professional development component, which is almost the careers element of the programme. And that really has three main components, one being a range of workshops which equip the students with a toolkit of skills that they can take away to the workplace. So those are things like building soft skills in areas of presentation skills, networking skills, negotiation skills, which are really life skills when you work in an industry like banking and finance. The other elements are job search focused workshops, where we help the students with brushing up on their CVs and cover writing skills. We also do a range of job search strategy workshops and interview skills later in the year, and also negotiation skills for negotiating job offers and so on.

The other element is a one-to-one coaching programme that we offer all through the year. So the students have access to a careers coach who works with them on a one-on-one basis and can cover any areas that they would wish to cover. It may be brushing up on their resume. It may be prepping them for an interview in a specific area of finance.

Well, I’ve just tried to give you a very quick overview of the structure of the programme. It’s a 12-month programme. We do cover a lot. We try and give the students as much knowledge on the theory of finance, as well as the applied elements of finance.

The project exposure is great. It gives them hands-on experience. We try and help them develop their soft skills, as well, through our personal and professional development component and give them access to as many high-profile financiers and bankers who share their industry insights through our Speaker Series.