Federico Bartzabal is a current student of the Master in Finance program (September 2010-June 2011) from Uruguay. Federico is a recipient of IE Fellowship award and is collaborating with IE on different activities including weekly Campus Tours and marketing projects. Today he wants to share with us his student life at IE.
When I was looking for a school to continue with my post-graduate studies in finance my aim was to find a top ranked institution with a practical approach to market demands. I also knew that IE had a very diverse student body profile in terms of nationalities and backgrounds, but I didn’t realize just how important this was until I started class. A couple of weeks after I started I noticed that I was learning as much from my classmates as from the professors!
I came here with very high expectations – when choosing a master we look for excellent academic preparation and a school that will give us a competitive advantage to finding our dream job. Fortunately, all my expectations have been surpassed by the quality of the faculty – where a high percentage are very successful professionals – and the quality of my classmates. It is clear that during the admissions process IE selects the best and most diverse students, which is incredibly important as during the program we spend hundreds of hours working together on many projects and learning from each other. Furthermore, as the Master in Finance is a very demanding program, with many hours spent in workgroups, the program helps you to build true friendships with your classmates, the best kind of network possible. When finishing the master you will have a very good circle of friends, all of them good students with high potential, so you have built an excellent network across the world without even realizing it!
For those students who want to know a bit more about the program, I must say it is a very intense program! We start our day with a 7am group meeting, and then from 9am-3pm we have classes. After class we continue studying and working until around midnight. Sometimes, the workload is even heavier but this gives us the opportunity to be exposed to the whole universe of finance and in my opinion this is one of the highlights of the program.
The remaining time of the course is full of amazing moments with your classmates and other IE students in a lot of different bars (Madrid has many), playing sports, taking part in student clubs or just gathering at someone’s house to play poker or just chat. When you have finished the Master, you will feel much more confident about yourself as a professional, have an invaluable network of true friends and a ton of amazing memories to look back on…you will definitely be different person pre and post Master.
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