Frequently Asked Questions about the MFE Program
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Your pre-application course requirements do not include a university-level course in Finance. Isn't preparation in Finance useful, and if so, why is it not a requirement?
Certainly Economics and Finance are closely related disciplines, and undergraduate preparation in Finance is useful to students in our Program. In assessing an applicant's academic transcript, our Admissions Committee does give positive weight to courses in Finance. But the target admission group for our Program consists of students who are completing or have recently completed undergraduate studies in Economics. Finance is typically taught in Business Schools, and in some universities Finance courses are only open to students enrolled in business programs -- meaning that undergraduate Economics students are not able to take them. To require that our applicants have at least one course in Finance would deny access to students who come from such universities.
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I am not certain that I fully understand all of your pre-application course requirements. Can you be more explicit?
We require that applicants have either completed or are in the process of completing full-year-equivalent, university-level courses in each of calculus, statistics, intermediate microeconomics, and intermediate macroeconomics. A full-year-equivalent course is one that either spans an entire academic year or consists of 2 courses, each of one semester's duration.
Mathematics departments in virtually all universities around the world offer a fairly standard full-year-equivalent, introductory course in calculus, and it is this standard that we require.
Introductory courses in Statistics, on the other hand, vary markedly across universities and even within a university. What we require is that an applicant have in-depth preparation in the following topics: Sample Statistics; Probability Theory; Discrete and Continuous Random Variables, including the concepts of Expected Value, Variance, and the Covariance and Correlation between two random variables; The Central Limit Theory and Sampling Distributions; Hypothesis Testing; Linear and Multiple Regression. It is not possible to cover all these topics in depth in a less than full-year-equivalent course.
In regard to our requirement of a full-year-equivalent course in each of intermediate-level microeconomic theory and macroeconomic theory, some applicants are uncertain of the meaning of "intermediate-level".
The following should clarify this: Virtually all universities offer various "levels"of courses in economic theory. The introductory-level course invariably consists of one semester of micro and one semester of macro, and this introductory-level course is a pre-requisite to higher-level courses. We naturally assume that all applicants will have completed introductory-level micro and macro and we require that they also complete a full-year-equivalent, higher-level course in each of microeconomics and macroeconomics. Designators for such higher-level courses do vary from university to university. For example, one university might offer successive one-semester courses called "Intermediate Micro I" and "Intermediate Micro II", while another university might label these courses "Intermediate Micro" and "Advanced Micro", respectively.
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After reading the preceding answer, I am still not certain whether I satisfy your pre-application course requirements. Can I send you a copy of my academic transcript and have you review it prior to my making an application?
It is up to the applicant to determine whether he/she meets the pre-application requirements. Given the size of our program and the number of applications we receive, we simply do not have sufficient administrative and academic staff to review transcripts of prospective applicants.
