By Carolyn Gray Anderson
On December 19, UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian conferred master of financial engineering degrees on the 6th graduating class of Anderson’s MFE program. The 43 graduates — hailing from some two dozen countries — completed the rigorous one-year curriculum that prepares them for careers in risk management, asset management, derivative pricing, private equity, hedge funds and technical operation areas of corporate finance.
This year’s commencement speaker was Ronald Kahn, global head of Scientific Equity Research at BlackRock in San Francisco. Kahn is a renowned expert on active portfolio management, risk modeling and quantitative investing. He is responsible for enhancing BlackRock’s Scientific Active Equity products and upholding their research standards.
Kahn teaches the equities half of International Equity and Currency Markets in UC Berkeley’s MFE program, and, he says, he likes to hire MFEs. Having gone from physics to finance before the advent of formal degree programs of that sort, he expressed both a “rational” and an “intuitive” appreciation for MFEs. “I know the size of the hole that MFE programs have filled for engineers and scientists who want to work in finance,” said. “The art of investing is evolving into the science of investing, and MFE graduates are perfectly poised to help drive that evolution.”
Kahn warmly related personal stories going back to his early days at BARRA (now MSCI, a leading provider of investment decision support tools), where he first met Richard Grinold, with whom he has authored many papers and the well-known Active Portfolio Management: Quantitative Theory and Applications. He said he found his way to BARRA through a bit of luck (“Never turn down luck,” he admonished the grads) and by maximizing contacts throughout his network. In what he described as an “academic environment,” BARRA enabled him to teach as much to industry professionals as he was learning from them.
Joining Dean Judy Olian in emphasizing the importance of upholding principles and integrity in business, Kahn’s other main career recommendation for the graduates was, “Look for the opportunities that arise from failures and disruptions.” He said the primary outlets for opportunity in active equity management include smart data, big data and the dearth of financial products designed to accrue to the benefit of clients as opposed to their creators.
Graduate Hoshang Daroga (’14) was selected by his peers to address the Class of 2014. He gave a shout out to his own family, unable to be present but watching the ceremony via webcast. Daroga summed up his MFE experience as a 43-seat rollercoaster: “Once you’re buckled in, there’s no getting off.” His classmates responded to his inside jokes about the group and about certain classes they all took together, conveying the inevitable closeness that arises among people experiencing the same academic intensity all together. “We may forget the Black-Scholes equation,” he joked, “but we won’t forget each other.”
UCLA Anderson Professor Francis Longstaff was chosen by the graduating class to receive the MFE Teaching Excellence Award, presented to him at the commencement ceremony by MFE Class of 2014 President Gert Dekegel (’14). Dekegel thanked Longstaff not only for imparting knowledge in the classroom but also for describing those “real-world experiences from the ‘Street.’”
“Teaching in the MFE program is one of the best perks of teaching here at Anderson,” said Longstaff. He closed by assuring the MFE Class of 2014 that whereas there’s typically a dichotomy between “quants” and “poets,” these graduates showed him impressive breadth during their tenure at Anderson. He’s certain this class “can do it all.”
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