Master’s Degree in Finance, Transfer from one program to another, Vietnamese-American

Financial institutions are in dire need of interpreters and I am a Vietnamese-American seeking to be of service, putting my Vietnamese/English skills to good use. In this way, I can help Vietnam, my family’s country of origin, to develop economically. I am writing what follows on behalf of my application to transfer from my current program of study to XXXX University Master’s Degree in Finance because of my profound admiration for your faculty in particular and your institution generally speaking. Some of my special areas of interest are the identification of credit card fraud and the maximization of investment portfolio based on market trends; thus, it would be a special honor to study under Professor XXXX, a recognized expert in the area of Portfolio Selection. I especially admire the way that Prof. XXXX came up with a model that is able to approximate the optimal selection of loans. In the area of mortgage risk, I especially admire her integration of macroeconomic factors and borrower behavior; and that of another faculty member in Finance at XXXX, XXXX, whose research focuses on understanding large-scale matrix and its applications in stock market and risk management. I could not be more engaged with his analysis of Risk Premium, Principal Component Analysis. I learned about PCA in my applied machine learning class, and I keenly look forward to learning as much as I can about this technique with so many variations and such power for interpreting large-scale data.

I attended XXXX for Summer School in 2015 and I really enjoyed the international and inclusive community. I will always remember the thermodynamics lectures taught by XXXX, professor in Mechanical Engineering, where he described designing thermo-systems as similar to “walking in a dark cave…using assumptions and mathematical tools to guide us forward.” XXXX also has state-of-the-art facilities, such as the Advanced Financial Technologies Laboratory.  I want to contribute to inventing new machine learning algorithms and predictive software to drive down the cost of making decisions, serving as a consultant with respect to financial markets, agriculture, etc. - an independent consultant who excels at machine learning algorithms and software frameworks, providing his clients with invaluable insights with respect to potential costs and benefits

For a variety of reasons having to do with living in Germany, I wish to transfer to my ideal program, in America, Finance at XXXX University, because it represents all of my new directions and intellectual and social interests. I am no longer a good career fit with the department of industrial engineering at my current university, TU Darmstadt, in Germany. I am very thankful, however, for the great deal that I have learned here, especially about algorithms, statistical learning tools, and applied machine learning. I have found that algorithms can be used to solve a myriad of combinatorial problems such as finding best facility location, data compression, and strategy planning. I appreciate how this becomes increasingly easier to the extent to which the computational power of computers evolves and more efficient algorithms appear. We are soon going to live in a time in which making predictions using machine learning algorithms is very cheap, and such predictions will help corporate and government to reduce potential risks and costs.

I want to explore and invent new prediction tools from scratch, rather than calling written libraries. This is why I hope to continue on in my studies in Finance at some point at the doctoral level. I have participated research in the effect of turbulence on the lift force for 1.5 years. During the course of this research I have mastered the skills of setting up experiment, how to determine the control variables, and how to collect and analyze experiment data. I have been through difficult situations where the data do not fall in the range of our expected values, however me and my supervisor were always working together to find where the problem might arise and redesign the testing apparatus. After 1.5 years of hard work, this research project has turned into a published paper which I had the privilege to put my name on.

First focusing my studies on optics and then industrial engineering, I have experienced success and failure, changes in direction, but could not be more pleased and stable at this time with the balance of my life being dedicated to Finance, which makes all that I have done before relevant, including those endeavors which I have tended to think of as failures over the years, such as designing MATLAB Simulink, designing experiment apparatus, and so forth. I make progress based on failure. I know how to research relevant literature, and make a collection of knowledge for my own use.

I thank you for considering my application to Finance at XXXX.