Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

MSc Finance - need advice from profs or mature students

Hey there.

I am applying for a MSc Finance program at HEC Lausanne university and would like to ask for some advice regarding the specialisations that this uni is offering. I am currently working in compliance department for a large bank which is driving my motivation to do a Masters in Finance. I already have a bachelors in Finance. My aim is to have a good balance between quantitative and qualitative degree but i think if i specialize in something very specific, it'll close down my avenues to work for companies other than banks due to a narrower knowledge. So keeping in mind that my aim is to maximize the generalization of the degree, i have the following specializations to choose from:

•

The "Asset and risk management" orientation is a direct follow up to the previous MScF with highly quantitative skills. This orientation is more technical building on empirical methods in finance, quantitative asset and risk management I and II, as well as alternative investments and banking.

•

With the orientation in "Corporate finance", we extended our palette to make it an authentic orientation. It provides a solid understanding of valuation and how to perform a financial analysis of firms in general. In advanced courses, students will learn about private equity, venture capital and how to restructure firms.

•

An orientation in "Financial entrepreneurship and data science" has also been introduced, to meet the information technological challenges that the finance industry will face over the coming years. We also hope that some of our students will become entrepreneurs, either fully independently running their own startup, or as leaders of Finance-IT directed projects for the industry. This orientation provides students with a solid background in finance and an introduction to information technology and data science as related to finance. This program will not make a programmer out the students but should provide them with the necessary knowledge to instruct programs to implement the required tools to deal with fintech / crowd funding, robo-advising, chat-bots, distributed ledgers. Students will also have knowledge of themes that belong to machine learning such as classification algorithms, deep learning, and natural language processing to just name a few.

I am leaning towards Corporate Finance which is what i chose in the online application but i do have an option to get that changed and now i am thinking of "Financial entrepreneurship and data science" as it provides some programming knowledge which will be very beneficial for the future but i do want to avoid the datascience topic which sounds very dry to me.

To summarize: I need a specialization that can open up more avenues rather than closing them due to the narrowness of the course.

Cheers for all the help!