Capstone Project

Applied Finance Project

The Applied Finance Project (AFP) is a capstone experience designed to give MFE students the opportunity to apply their knowledge to solve a financial engineering problem for a company or organization. The experience combines client communication, team collaboration, and practical application of students’ quantitative abilities.

AFP projects concentrate on such areas as quantitative trading strategies, portfolio management, risk management, hedging and derivatives valuation, and are sponsored by top organizations that include PIMCO, Citi, PwC, Aspirant, Accenture, AXA Rosenberg, Hyundai Capital and Research Affiliates. Students interact directly with clients, gaining valuable exposure to potential employers and broadening their professional networks.

Alumni Testimonials

“The AFP gave me exposure and structure to solve a real-world financial engineering problem, looking for potential methodologies, testing them empirically and providing reasoning behind the solutions, while working face-to-face with established professionals. Learning to present the process and intuitions behind the results has been quite useful in my current role.”

Sebastian Orozco de la Paz (MFE ’20)
Money Desk Operator, Banco Bci, Chile

“As a student in the AFP, I learned a lot of things beyond the textbook. I realized that industrial application could be vastly different from academia. So, after I started working at this company, I have managed several AFPs with students. They have contributed a lot to the project, and we have been able to leverage their fantastic work, as we have used some of it in our actual production. It’s definitely a win-win situation.”

Jeremy Zhu (MFE ’17)
Associate, CNH Partners LLC (Arbitrage Affiliate of AQR Capital Management)

“I have a data science background and was interested in pursuing a career in in the finance industry. For my AFP, I chose a machine learning project on interpreting financial texts using natural language processing (NLP). I had no prior experience in NLP, but the AFP gave me the opportunity to learn the end-to-end process, from scraping 10-K data from SEC websites to building latent Dirichlet application (LDA) models for topic modeling. Fortunately, during my internship, my team was working with LDA models, and I was able to share my knowledge with them.”

Mudit Gurnani (MFE ’20)
Senior Data Scientist, SoFi

“The AFP was a unique opportunity for me. The topic my group chose was about forecasting short-term price movements for execution algorithms. The project served as an excellent reference for me during my job search and opened up new avenues for learning.”

Shagoon Malhotra (MFE ’18)
Quantitative Researcher, BlackRock

“The AFP built a bridge between my education and my career. I worked closely with a company where I applied valuable skills from my MFE experience to a real-life situation. My performance led to a consulting position in the company, which became my reference for my current employer. I am grateful for my AFP experience and its critical role in my transition from academia to the private finance sector.”

Timothy Engle (MFE ’17)
Senior Associate, Morgan Stanley, NYC

Employer Testimonials

“I love participating in the AFP. It’s a way of vetting talent. If you have a data science problem, you know you can participate in UCLA Anderson’s AFP and find students to help you — you can depend on them! If I randomly select a CV of someone in this program, I know that person is likely to be productive, self-motivated and technically astute. Employers don’t want to have to start from scratch to find great talent.”

Gina Sanchez*
CEO, Chantico Global, LLC

*New Member to our MFE Advisory Board

“It is so refreshing to see such commitment and quality in the work delivered by the MFE students as part of the Applied Finance Projects! Our joint sessions with the students are true brainstorming opportunities that stimulate new ideas and solutions to complex problems.”

Cristina Polizu
Managing Director, S&P Global Ratings

“As an alumnus, it’s been a pleasure to participate in the AFP on the employer side. We have participated twice, and we’re going to keep coming back! There are a lot of complex and abstract problems we are looking to solve and only so many minds. They’re always going to offer us new and different perspectives. We want to view the students’ perspectives in case there is something we haven’t thought of.”

Jason C. Mercurio (MFE ’16)
Founder and CEO, Ageless Partners, Los Angeles

“The Applied Finance Project is an excellent opportunity to work with bright, enthusiastic students on a creative research project. The semi-monthly project meetings frequently inspire fascinating conversations that uncover new ideas and fresh approaches to traditional finance questions.”

Bradford Rowe
Director of Factor Research, Los Angeles Capital Management

“AFP is a win-win for both companies and students. For us, it's an opportunity to work on research projects that get postponed because of resource constraints. UCLA Anderson MFE students have excellent work experience and skills in Math, Finance and Programming needed to research and build a framework for banking projects.”

Achal Shah
Associate Director, KPMG