Profile Review/Improvement

[anonymousc]

Hi all,

I've included my profile below, wondering if I would be a competitive applicant to the schools listed and any potential areas for improvement you may see:

Education: Bachelor's degrees in Economics, Finance, and Mathematics from a US state school. 3.96 cumulative GPA. CFA and CAIA charterholder. Should have good letters of recommendations from two upper level Mathematics professors and current CIO.

Work experience: 3 years at a fund of hedge funds as an analyst doing research and portfolio management.

Test scores: GRE 170Q, 166V

Schools:
Tier 1: Princeton, Stanford, CMU, Baruch
Tier 2: Columbia, MIT, UC Berkeley
Tier 3: UCLA, U Chicago

In terms of areas for improvement, I don't have much of a formal programming background so I was considering doing a pre-MFE course in that area. The other main concern I have is my undergraduate degrees are not from a high ranking school (large US state school, roughly T-75), although that's not changeable at this point. Any thoughts are appreciated!

 

[QuantCoach]

Should have a good shot to most of these schools with a decent statement of purpose and decent performance on the admission interviews (Baruch's interview was quite technical but should be safe if you go through Dan's book prior to it, Princeton and CMU's interview is more to just gauge your interest in finance, Berkeley interview is with an alumni and was some standard green/regression questions but may vary depending on the alumni). Stanford is a bit of a weird one; not quite sure what their admission criteria is but I seen students get into Princeton and not Stanford.

 

[gini_coeff]

Which master is the one at Stanford?

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Mathematical and Computational Finance

mcf.stanford.edu