Please I will appreciate your opinion in deciding which country among the US, Uk and Canada will offer me the best prospect of a MSc program in a Finance related discipline and getting a part time or full time job on a student visa in Investment Management or Capital market related functions. I am a level 3 CFA candidate from West Africa.
In the US you can’t work off campus on a full-time student visa while in Canada you are allowed to work part-time. Not a clue about the UK.
Inner Evil Voice Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > In the US you can’t work off campus on a full-time > student visa while in Canada you are allowed to > work part-time. Not a clue about the UK. many thanks, the MSc program will be a part time program. I understands lectures are from 6.30pm - 9pm. is the prospect of a job better in the US than the canada? and are there many A-rated Universities in one country than the other. These are areas I will really appreciate your opinion.
What are your existing credentials?
In the US, when you apply for a student visa you’ll have to prove at least one year of secured funding for tuition and living expenses at your local embassy because no International student can work unless they get an on-campus offer as RA, TA or similar, and normally those positions are reserved to doctoral students. Therefore, even if the hours allow you to take a FT or PT job, your immigration status wouldn’t allow it, so being an International student and working off-campus is not possible. From the funding perspective, Canada is way more accessible. Probably you may want to check if there’s a realistic way to fund your degree in the US before comparing educational advantages between programs in both countries. Conversely, you may try to secure employment first via an H1B visa and then find an evening MSc. program. The likelihood of this route depends on your experience. There’s a fine guy around here on AF, numi, who helps people with their careers. Maybe he can take a look at your resume to see whether you have a decent shot. Drop him a line at porcupines @ gmail. Tell him IEV recommended you and he may offer a discount.
Many thanks IEV, funding this program is not a constraint, what is important to me is the ease of getting a job for the relevant experience required for the CFA charter. And possibly gaining an MSc qualification to be more competitive when I return home. At the moment, I work in mainstrain financial reporting and switching to Asset management/capital market role will not be very easy to find, without first going out of the country to acquire experience and additional qualification IMO. I will send your guy an email. And further comment will be appreciated.
@ IEV, I have sent your guy email, but no response yet. Ohai, I appreciate you want to help, if you post your email ad, I will contact you. Please is there any opinion on Creighton University’s MSAPM?
@Oal, unless you plan on working in Omaha, Nebraska you should go to a well known school like George Washington University (MSF), Carnegie Mellon (computational finance), NYU (Quant. Finance), Columbia (Financial Engineering), Boston College/Boston Uni. (MSF), Drexel Uni. (MSF) and etc
According to its website, Creighton’s MSAPM “gives you the knowledge base to sit for each of the three levels of CFA exams”; I am not sure why anyone would pay substantially more (several times more presumably) for a (purported) master’s degree on that material when they could pay substantially less for just doing the CFA program on a self-study basis. http://www.creighton.edu/business/graduate/msapmprogram/index.php
If your thinking UK then the obvious ones that spring to mind, LSE, LBS, Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, these are all very hard to get in to, the amount of applications they get are crazy, however places like LSE and LBS, Cambridge are very open to international students. But maybe Warwick or Cass slightly easier to get in, but if you have very good grades they all maybe worth a shot. Other great University’s in the UK, if you wanna head to the cold north, would be Edinburgh and St Andrews. Have you taken the GMAT? You will have to if applying to any of these. As for job opportunities, the UK has obviously had a better job market, but things are picking up, although the GDP figures are less then extraordinarily, they are still lots of vacancies, but very competitive, and the UK governments stance of the Financial industry here is not very positive And lets say you do go to a University in the UK and you cant find a suitable job, then maybe look to other European countries that only require English, usually Luxembourg (You would be bored to death there!), Netherlands (Ah schmokey schmokey), Germany (Die Germans are coming!!!), Ireland (Were im from, but you would be wasting your time, although there are lots of hedge funds set up there, but they are not hiring at all), maybe France (Do you speak French?) - Of course theres INSEAD were you could try to get into, very international. Again for Jobs on the Continent usually require a second language based on the country were the job is located, but there are still ops that require only English. Good Luck to you
Obviously when studying in UK it would be Logistically impossible to work in Europe, I was referring to when you finish your studies, as for getting a part time job while studying, it may be hard, depending on your existing credentials, what was you undergraduate degree? Also MBA’s over here are something you get when you have acquired substantial experience, luckily there is not the same stigma as the US when it comes to MBA’s here and as long as you have good grades in your undergrad coupled with an excellent grades in your postgrad, you should be fine finding a entry level job, in some investment house, although there are some places that will put weight on the ‘prestige’ of your University, but not anything like you will find in the US, were they seam to care more about the name of your University, rather then your actual intelligence. The reason is that these places are used to getting applications from students from all universities in the UK and Ireland, and from Uni’s in the Continent that dont even make it to the top 100 Universities by ranking, and they tend not to discriminate based on your Uni, but obviously going to somewhere like the LSE and getting a first class honors degree would make things easier. Plus we dont use comments like ‘make it rain’ (I thought id make a quick stab) Oh and you can work and study with a Visa in the UK
One last thing, im not sure that getting a visa for the UK then gives you permission to work freely throughout the rest of Europe. I mean being from Ireland also make’s me Irish and European I can work and live free as a bird anywhere in Europe, including the UK, but I would doubt there is a European wide visa, as each country in Europe may have their own visa requirements. But I can guarantee you that it is much much easier to get a visa for over-here then it would be for the US, plus you cannot work and study in the US. Sorry for all the rambling’s, but everyone were I work is watching that bloody wedding so I have nothing to do!
Pedpenny, There is a Schengen visa, but it’s only for tourists and only for Schengen zone (and UK is not a part of it, not sure about Ireland). Working visa is separate for each country. Oal29, If funding is not a problem, you might look for internships, which can be as long as one year, are badly paid, but give you relevant experience. Please note, that for CFA internships and part-time jobs are not valid. But when you get back home, some relevant experience like this can help you switch careers. I know many people in Spain, who got here with a student visa for a part-time master in finance/business administration/economics/statistics (or a full-time) and got a full-time badly paid internship at the same time (or later), which resulted (or not) later in full-time well-paid (or not so well-paid) job. There are plenty of masters here taught in English, by the way. You might want to have a look at Spain, as many of the people I know, got scholarships, and some of them quite substantial. I just would say, out of Spain many of these masters are not prestigious at all.
‘Why the massive increase in the number of people applying to PWC’s spring programme is depressing’ http://news.students.efinancialcareers.co.uk/newsandviews_item/newsItemId-32196 The title says it all
Many thanks all, I appreciate your feedback in helping me decide. I am worried Canada is not mentioned prominently despite the attraction of the citizenship offer. I want to lean towards Canada for this reason, but I have not been able to find a rated school that offer MSc Finance. Please any forumite from Canada willing to mention some top rated schools offering MSc in finance related discipline? Many thanks.