Admissions Insiders on Getting Into Top Master's Programs

Fiona Taft ran the Master of Quantitative Finance program at Berkeley Haas before starting her own coaching firm, and has watched hundreds of applicants get placed into finance and quant programs from the admissions side of the desk. Arlen Agiliga went from a finance degree at Northeastern to a Schwarzman Scholarship at Tsinghua and investment banking roles on three continents. Zuwena Virani earned her own master's at Oxford after starting at a state university, and now helps applicants write theses and personal statements for programs she once applied to herself. Each got into a top master's program by a different route, and this panel is about those differences: what a quant finance program wants that a humanities program does not, and how to make an unconventional background make sense on paper.