Finance Research Practicum™
Practice finance with leading industry professionals
The Finance Research PracticumTM is a graduate-level finance elective course in which students work in teams of three on projects proposed by external sponsor companies. Our goal is to provide students with an outstanding opportunity to work with leading industry practitioners on important business problems, while helping them bridge the gap between theory and practice, and introducing them to the broader financial community.
The course is full-time during the month of January and includes some preparation and follow-up before and after the full-time experience. Depending on the sponsoring company and location, students will work on-site and off-site.
Projects address real business problems. Most involve the use of one or more advanced technical skills, including financial econometrics, simulation, derivatives valuation, optimization, and related software and programming languages.
Sample projects include:
1) Model development and evaluation to:
- Recommend whether a pension fund should conduct “tail risk hedging.”
- Help an endowment decide how much to allocate to an inflation swap that takes into account: the preferences of the investor; the risk-and-return characteristics of the swap; and the need to set aside and manage collateral.
- Value and hedge variable annuity guarantees amd Brazilian interest-rate options.
- Develop and back-test an equity trading strategy.
2) Create an agent-based model of the stock market that generates endogenous volatility; use this model to propose recommendations for how traditional portfolio construction methodology should be modified to account for endogenous risk.
3) Analyze the history of commercialization of university-based research in the Boston area and identify common attributes of successful ventures.
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“We are very much an action-learning environment. The way to learn leadership is not only through reading cases, not only through learning theory — in fact we don’t want people to regurgitate the theory. We want people to take theory and to live it, use it.”
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“For 35 years, we’ve been studying how companies get value from information. … We try to help organizations take a more holistic view of what they are trying to do.”
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“[The India Lab] program is one of the reasons I came to Sloan. ... The hands-on learning that MIT offers was a huge differentiator.”
“I can honestly say that when I was planning on coming to business school I never thought that witnessing the birth of a child would be included in the education. It was definitely an experience.”
“One of the reasons I came to Sloan was because I wanted to be at a top MBA institution worldwide. But I also wanted access to working with the latest innovations and the highest technology that was coming out of the MIT labs.”
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“It was really rewarding that they wanted to know what we thought. We left there being fairly certain that they will do some of the things that we suggested.”
"The classroom itself is filled with so much collective brain power . . . it's obvious that I'm caught up in a room full of 124 of the brightest, most curious people from around the world."
“By training tomorrow’s leaders to manage the risks of the financial system effectively and ethically, we’ll have a fighting chance of surviving even the largest crises.”
