I was interviewed last year.
No technical questions. You will have a short chat with the program director, talking about some general questions. For example, why study MAF, why smu, what is your current work, do you have enough time for studying, what's your future plan, and etc.
Suggestions: be very familiar with your resume, prepared to answer any questions from your resume, and prepare 3-5 questions to ask at the end of the interview (you may have time to cover 2 or 3 of them).
Around half of admitted applicants are from engineering backgrounds. Many are working as software engineers and want to switch to the financial industry via this program.
My personal options: if you are from an engineering background, you are good at math and are happy with studying math, and not hate progamming (vba, c++, matlab ...), MFE in NTU or NUS is probably a better choice than SMU MAF. You may have more opportunities to enter a IB or asset management company with a MFE degree than a MAF degree. As somebody said before on global derivatives, it's much easier for an engineer to self-study CFA than MFE. A MFE graduate can later self-study CFA and pass it easily, while it's much harder to self-study stochastic calculus and time series for a MAF graduate.
MFE and MAF programms are for different career paths. The former is mainly for a quantitative role which is most likely much related to derivatives pricing, say quantitative risk analysis (market risk or credit risk), desk quant (working with traders), trading, structuring, quant developer (programmer), and etc. The latter is mainly for a traditional finance role, say equity analysis, M&A, investment analysis, and etc.
MFE programs in NTU or NUS did have good placement records, but I donot know the placement record of SMU MAF. I asked the director about that, but he just said that they didnot have statistics about their placement. I think SMU MAF is mainly for people who have been working in the financial industry and want to be promoted or transfer to a different position. They want to pursue CFA but donot want to self-study those CFA materials, so MAF courses can help them study and eventually pass CFA. For those who want to jump into the financial industry, you will find it difficult to get a good job even if you have passed CFA level 3.
As for the reputation, of coz, SMU is a new univ. and it's not well known globally. But in Singapore, people know it's a good univ. and its graduates are comparable with those from NTU and NUS. Particularly in the finance field, SMU has some top professors. Some of them are from NUS business school. The quality of faculty in SMU finance is better than that in NTU and NUS in my opinion.
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https://forum.chasedream.com/dispbbs.asp?boardid=14&id=234779 (F/15)
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