University of California, Berkeley - Master of Financial Engineering

University of California, Berkeley - Master of Financial Engineering

Leverage the connections of a top placement team and a world-class university to launch your career.
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Location
Berkeley, CA 94720
Application deadline
Four rounds, generally January, March, July, and October
The program was launched in 2001.
Your entire Berkeley MFE experience is designed to give you the knowledge, experience, and connections you'll need to immediately launch a successful career in finance and data science. Fintech, blockchain, and artificial intelligence are just a few of the technologies disrupting the finance sector and our location in the heart of the Bay Area puts you at the center of all the amazing innovation taking place.

The Berkeley MFE Program at the Haas School of Business provides a depth of study in finance that reaches beyond basic business concepts to teach you how to combine modern portfolio theory with computational methods. Through the coursework, financial practice seminars, and tailored industry projects, you'll have many opportunities to learn firsthand how to apply these theories and methods to real-world situations. You will also benefit from the quality of students, breadth of activities, and network of impressive alumni contacts inherent to a top-ranked business school and a world-class university.

From your first day on campus, you benefit from access to a team of MFE-focused career specialists whose connections run both deep and wide across industries and around the globe. You also become part of the Haas Alumni Network— over 41,000 leaders influencing the future of business and finance. No matter which direction your career takes you, you can rely on the Berkeley Haas alumni network to connect you to the local community. Our students have gone on to work at companies like Goldman Sachs, Google, and Citadel to name a few.

Director: Ananth Madhavan
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2025 Ranking Data
Rank
4
Total Score
88
Peer Score
3.6
% Employed at Graduation
79%
% Employed at 3 months
92%
% Employed in the US
83%
Compensation
$168,263
Cohort Size
76 FT, 10 PT
Acceptance Rate
18.0%
Avg Undergrad GPA
3.74
Tuition
$82,901
Views
73,508
First release
Last update

Ratings

4.17 star(s) 41 reviews 3.90 star(s) Students Quality 4.24 star(s) Courses/Instructors 3.43 star(s) Career Services
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Latest reviews
Headline
Masterclass in Mismanagement and Misdirection
Class of
2025
If you're considering the UC Berkeley MFE programme, ask yourself this: are you prepared to spend a fortune and 12 months of your life navigating chaos, incompetence, and institutional gaslighting? Because that's what you're signing up for.

Let’s not sugarcoat this—the programme is a mess, top to bottom. During my time here, we had three executive directors in under a year. For half that time, there wasn’t even anyone leading career services. It felt like no one knew—or cared—what was going on. Students were left scrambling for jobs while the leadership played musical chairs and patted themselves on the back for “long-term vision.”

And let’s talk about cheating—because the programme certainly won’t. It’s everywhere. Students share answers, submit work they didn’t do, and openly collude on take-home exams. No one stops it. Why would they? The system practically rewards it. The administration turns a blind eye.

The career services “function” is a joke. For months, there was no one running it. When they finally hired someone, they somehow found the least qualified person imaginable.

The students are smart. But many are out for blood.It’s a shark tank—and not the fun kind. There’s no sense of community. No shared ambition. It’s survival of the sneakiest, and if you stumble, you’re on your own. Don't expect help, empathy, or even basic decency from some of your classmates.

This programme is living off an outdated reputation and the UC Berkeley name. It is broken at its core—academically, administratively, and culturally. You will not be supported. You will not be protected. You will not be told the truth.
Recommend
No, I would not recommend this program
Students Quality
2.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
2.00 star(s)
Career Services
1.00 star(s)
Upvote 4 Downvote
Headline
Mismanaged, Incompetence, Lies: A Deeply Flawed Experience
Class of
2025
I came into the Berkeley MFE programme expecting world-class instruction, strong career support, and a collaborative student environment. Unfortunately, what I found was a disorganised, poorly managed, and at times, downright demoralising experience.

Let’s start with leadership. In just one year, the programme cycled through THREE executive directors. For six months, there wasn’t even a career services director—an unbelievable failure for a programme that advertises career outcomes as one of its main strengths. During this time, students were left completely unsupported at a crucial stage of their job search.

To make matters worse, the programme office, led by Diane, made life difficult for students whose ambitions didn’t align with the office’s narrow view of acceptable career paths. I’ve never seen an administrator act so openly against student interests. Rather than supporting students in their goals, Diane and her team seemed to actively discourage independence, even when students were working hard to secure top-tier roles on their own.

Academics: Promising but Poorly Executed

The coursework itself is interesting, and some professors are genuinely excellent. The problem lies in the delivery. Cramming such dense material into eight-week modules makes real learning incredibly difficult. There's barely time to absorb the basics before you're thrown into exams or rushed group projects.

Even more concerning is the culture around academic integrity. Cheating is widespread—and worse, tolerated. The system unintentionally encourages students to game assignments and collaborate unethically. There’s no incentive to learn properly when it’s so much easier—and more effective—to cut corners. Linda, who is supposed to uphold academic standards, seems largely indifferent.

Career Services: A Stunning Letdown

To describe the current state of career services as "non-existent" would be to offer an unearned compliment. Career support, at present, is a disaster. Several students who landed roles at leading hedge funds or quant firms did so entirely on their own. In some cases, the MFE office actually stood in the way. When Ann Marie was finally hired to lead career services, many hoped things would improve. They didn’t. She lacked even basic knowledge of the finance world—unable to distinguish between banks and hedge funds, unfamiliar with firms like BNP Paribas, and utterly unaware of what quantitative roles entail. She encouraged students to apply to unrelated start-ups in San Francisco, which felt like a complete misunderstanding of our goals.

The new programme director, Dr. Ananth Madhavan, appears more enamoured with abstract curricular reform than with the immediate and pressing needs of job-seeking students. His “long-term vision” may bear fruit someday, but it offers little comfort to the current cohort staring down fast-approaching graduation dates.

To her credit, Linda has an uncanny knack for securing placements—but only for those lucky enough to fall within her circle of favour. If you’re considering this programme, take note: success may depend less on merit and more on the quality of your flattery.

And let me be clear: the placement numbers the programme advertises are heavily manipulated, if not blatantly false. They are designed to impress prospective students and recruiters, not to reflect the truth.

Cohort and Culture: Competitive to a Fault

The cohort is undeniably smart. But the culture is cutthroat. Students don’t share resources, don’t help each other, and in some cases, actively withhold information to gain an edge. One student, for example, accepted a job in January but kept his résumé in circulation, gathering ten offers—each one taking away an opportunity from someone else. It’s every man (or woman) for themselves, and if you're expecting a collaborative or supportive group of peers, you're in for a rude awakening.

Final Verdict

Unless you have absolutely no better option, I would not recommend the UC Berkeley MFE. You’ll likely leave the programme frustrated, possibly underprepared, and without meaningful support in your job search. The teaching has potential, but is rushed. The career services are dysfunctional. The office politics are exhausting. And the community is anything but supportive.

If you're serious about a future in quantitative finance or asset management, I would strongly advise looking at other top programmes—Princeton, CMU, Columbia, or Chicago all offer better structure, fairer environments, and more reliable career support. Berkeley may have the brand, but right now, the programme is not living up to it.
Recommend
No, I would not recommend this program
Students Quality
3.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
4.00 star(s)
Career Services
1.00 star(s)
Upvote 4 Downvote
  • Anonymous
  • 3.00 star(s)
Headline
Lies
Class of
2023
"Ever wonder what it's really like to step into the world of Wall Street, after all that studying? That's exactly what the MFE class of 2025 got to experience this fall. Imagine going from classroom theories to actually applying them in a high-stakes environment. And guess what? Every single student – 100%! – landed internships at a diverse range of companies, from big investment banks to fast-paced trading floors."

The Berkeley MFE blog posted this on their blog today. I have been talking to a lot of students from the class of 2025, and this is a lie. About 20% of the batch did not have any internship this fall, and they had to work with profs during the fall break.

I understand there have been a number of leadership changes in the program, but the problem needs to take accountability for their lazy approach towards career services.

PS: The only shining light in the armour is Linda, without her this program would be dead
Recommend
No, I would not recommend this program
Students Quality
5.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
4.00 star(s)
Career Services
1.00 star(s)
Upvote 3 Downvote
Headline
Update to that 'Some facts about the Berkeley MFE program'
Class of
2025
Graduating this year. I used to keep quiet the last 10 month, until I learned that career person left this week, again, in less than three months working for nothing. Honestly, career service here deserves a 1-star rating (would give 0 if I could).

It’s shocking how the school and program selected an Executive Director and Career Director, only for both to leave after just three months. Maybe they just did a 3-month intern here or maybe this whole situation is just a lesson MFE is trying to teach their students (or anyone reading this):
1. If something is wrong, it’s probably even worse than you think—so take your time and walk away.
2. If you landed a job mainly because of MFE connections with BlackRock or some other partner on certain projects, you can be let go just as fast, market will speak and do the correction very swiftly.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the new Executive Director takes the same route to leave tomorrow—imho, it might be the smartest move to avoid further embarrassment. Former ED Linda kept begging alumni to give the class some jobs (clearly she did not trust this new ED) - I hope this will help me and other people (80% still got 0 offer).
Recommend
No, I would not recommend this program
Students Quality
1.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
3.00 star(s)
Career Services
1.00 star(s)
Upvote 5 Downvote
  • Anonymous
  • 1.00 star(s)
Headline
Some facts about the Berkeley MFE program
Class of
2024
I agree with almost all the negative feedback here, and those so-called positive reviews come from people the program privately reached out to, begging them to write something favorable. Just see how that backfires now.

I want to provide another perspective: I have repeatedly received misleading, useless, and annoying emails (30+ in total) from Sonia Moctezuma, the person responsible for student services. These emails include direct complaints toward students about low response rates and lack of class review participation—without ever reflecting on why students have lost trust in these processes. She has even issued threats that grades would not be released unless a subjective participation rate was met (after multiple begging). Ironically, even after this rate was reached, the grades were still not released until a month later. She is a despicable person who abuses her 'petty power' over students yet never considers why there has been so much negative feedback.

Additionally, she frequently sends emails without including necessary attachments (only to follow up with another email saying, "Sorry, I missed it!"—which has happened around 10 times). She also forces students to participate in useless events (even threatening them to turn their cameras on) and mistakenly sends emails intended for specific individuals to the entire group.

I am certain she will see this post—since students have been threatened not to leave any negative comments here—but I will speak out. Her complete lack of understanding of how a normal program should be managed has only further exacerbated an already terrible student experience—or perhaps this program is no longer normal, so to speak.

In fact, after the former executive director abruptly left the program without any notice or explanation in the middle of the academic year (l believe she worked in the program for less than four months), the program hired someone with no background in the financial industry. This person made fundamental errors in finance, repeatedly misspelled the names of well-known companies, and provided little to no career resources. Instead, all she did was encourage students to "network." l don't understand why our tuition was spent this way.

Piece of two-cents from the slide for MFE students:

1. Exploratory and Learning Outreach: based on reading you’ve done about the industry, finding people: SWE’s, recruiters (industry experts) to learn more about their background, gain industry insight, etc.

2. Proactive Target Company Outreach: after research, reach out to SWEs and recruiters at companies that excite / interest you to ask them about the company, the hiring process, how to prepare, etc.

3. Recruiter Follow Up Outreach: after you apply for a job, you message SWEs and Recruiters to talk about the specific role you applied for and insight about the company.

Looks like this person wasn’t even willing to spend five minutes replacing SWE with quants to 'fool the students.' Feel sorry for this—since this new career services person just lost her previous job before finding this one.
Recommend
No, I would not recommend this program
Students Quality
2.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
2.00 star(s)
Career Services
1.00 star(s)
Upvote 6 Downvote
Headline
Be ready for a new announcement
Class of
2024
The program and Linda have managed to rope in a big figure as the new Director, this will make the program substantially better than it was for the past few years.
Recommend
Yes, I would recommend this program
Students Quality
4.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
5.00 star(s)
Career Services
4.00 star(s)
Upvote -6 Downvote
Headline
A program in decline
Class of
2025
Admission process was fairly easy. Just a technical with an alumni. Instructor quality is distributed. Most are good. Few were horrible. Was surprised to see such poor quality professors in such a reputed program. Career services are non existent. The MFE program has no current director and no career services head. Administrative staff is entirely running the program. Consequently, no companies are coming. Anyways, Berkeley MFE has a bad reputation among employers. They have literally let anyone in. Some students are smart tbh. But at some students you will feel how did they even cross the bar to enter. In short, avoid joining the Berkeley MFE unless you just want it as a visa ticket. Expect no help in placement and minimal learning in this tightly compressed program.
Recommend
No, I would not recommend this program
Students Quality
2.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
4.00 star(s)
Career Services
1.00 star(s)
Upvote 5 Downvote
Headline
Superb MFE Program with Great Connections
Class of
2024
Although there was a little bit of turmoil going around the staffing issue, I still find the MFE program at Berkeley amazing. Fiona and the MFE office still maintained the connections with the top companies, and that definitely helped me land a decent job. As long as you keep working on honing your interview skills, you'll be successful.
Recommend
Yes, I would recommend this program
Students Quality
3.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
5.00 star(s)
Career Services
5.00 star(s)
Upvote -12 Downvote
  • Anonymous
  • 3.00 star(s)
Headline
Lots of Potential With Many Flaws
Class of
2025
I have seen lots of very positive reviews pop up lately which seem a bit suspicious so I am leaving one because of that.

This is a program with a lot of potential but there are many flaws that it seems they have not bothered fixing despite students complaining for a long time. I find that the previous reviews don't mention problems students actually have with the program and don't give appropriate info for incoming students to make a decision that is best for their career.

Pros:
- Professors are world class researchers and very prominent in their fields
- helpful and responsive alumni network
- rigorous and in depth courses that focus on very relevant material to what is actually done in industry


Cons:
- World class research doesn't translate into world class teaching, some professors are not great lecturers, they are only made even more ineffective by long lectures. All lectures are at least 2 hours long, some classes have lectures up to 4 or even 6 hours long.

- The curriculum is very rigorous but only 1 year long. This translates into a very large amount of work for students. There has been quite little outings and socializing in our batch since the start of the program because everyone is busy even during weekends. The only down time you get is after finals which is usually filled with interviews and OAs. Slowing down the pace, even a little, would greatly benefit the students.

- You are graded on a curve, there is a lot to this so there are 3 parts.

Part 1: The maximum allowed GPA in any class is a 3.5, so half of the class will have below a 3.5 (at best). This creates a competitive environment between students. This has ugly side effects mainly exams that are made harder than they should be to spread the curve, often the difficulty comes by adding content only briefly covered in class greatly benefiting students who have a better background. TLDR your grade doesn't reflect what the professor taught you but what you know relative to your peers.

Part 2: Everyone gets full marks on homework (you still have to do everything correctly, its not free points), which is very time consuming, this means that doing the homework is bare minimum for any class. That also means that the homework weight is irrelevant since the spread comes from exams. If your homework is 60% and everyone gets an A, then effectively the final exam is 100% of your grade. TLDR: Poor test takers are brutally punished by this program.

Part 3: Cheating. The vast majority of the class is honest and doesn't cheat.
Having spoken to alumni who over graduated over 10 years ago, the cheating is still a problem (I was extremely surprised when they complained about the exact same issue we have now). The issue is there is a very well established flow of Chinese students for a fixed set of universities. They have exams and solutions passed on from previous years, and the exams change little year over year. So they effectively have the answer key to the exam which is 100% of your grade, and you are graded on a curve. Similarly, some students have past years' homework solutions meaning they spend much less time on work and have time to interview, and prepare better. In a way I can't blame them for cheating, but the fact the program has not fixed this in over a decade is upsetting to both me and alumni. We have already had this happen on a few exams this year, even with evidence no punishments were given to anyone.

- Many students feel somewhat mislead on the internship availability. We were told not to worry about finding internships in the beginning and many didn't apply for summer opportunities because of that (since we are forced to study full time alongside the internship in the summer). However, it turns out that we should have been quite worried. This year there have been virtually no postings for fall internships on sites, there are very few opportunities and we are completely reliant on the program to bring us the ones there are. There were actually very many opportunities, but it was offset by the second point. To compound the problems, firms chased after the top students who rejected many offers, in turn this causes those firms to take no interns at all and leave, screwing over other students. The program should have been much more strict with this behavior. Why are students who get top summer internships still allowed to stay in the fall pool and out compete other students?

Conclusion:
Overall, I somewhat regret attending this program to be honest. So far it has been very stressful and expensive. I am learning a lot, that is true, I feel like I have a good grasp of the concepts I am being taught and the classes are very interesting, but getting high marks is very difficult. I feel that my deflated GPA has hurt my chances at finding a job more than a masters degree on my resume will help.

The bad market and fall internship cycle have made searching for internships very difficult.

This program is basically a recruiting opportunity with classes, I wish it was better communicated that you must be completely ready to recruit for quant roles prior to enrolling the program. You will not have time to prepare once the program starts.
Recommend
No, I would not recommend this program
Students Quality
4.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
3.00 star(s)
Career Services
3.00 star(s)
Upvote 15 Downvote
  • Anonymous
  • 5.00 star(s)
Headline
Top Quant Finance Program
Class of
2024
I truly believe Berkeley MFE is one of the top quant finance programs. It will help you launch a career in this highly competitive field. No program is perfect, but I believe Berkeley MFE comes very close.

Coursework:
Quant Finance is huge and it is impossible to teach everything. The coursework does a nice job of helping students build the ABC of quant finance and then tries to supplement it with more specialized courses. The coursework did an exceptional job at laying down a strong base (empirical finance/stochastic calc), which didn’t just help with interviews, but is absolutely necessary if you are going to work in a top QR/QT role. It did a good job of covering specific asset classes and advanced topics (Fixed Income/HFT/Active Portfolio Management). I would love to see more options in advanced coursework.

Students:
I loved being part of a diverse and talented cohort. The fact that most people enter the program with existing work experience makes getting to know everyone and working alongside a diverse skillset highly rewarding. Most people in the program were exceptionally talented and I made amazing friends here. You do compete with some of the best people in this field for a whole year, but you will appreciate the outcome.

Career Services:
The program office does everything under its control, to ensure you get the possible interns and full-time placements. They are proactive in interacting with the students, figuring out what is in their best interest, and reaching out to employers with the best opportunities. The job market wasn’t in the best shape in 2023-24, but the program office didn’t give up and did vastly better than most of the other programs. There were some changes in the team towards the end of 2024, but their dedication to the students didn’t change.

My verdict:
This program is no golden bullet for a best-of-the-best quant finance role. It gives you the right tools and support, to be able to shape your career trajectory. If you believe you are talented and ready to work hard, Berkeley MFE should be one of your top choices.
Recommend
Yes, I would recommend this program
Students Quality
4.00 star(s)
Courses/Instructors
5.00 star(s)
Career Services
4.00 star(s)
Upvote -13 Downvote
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