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MSc in Finance
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Welcome to the MSc in Finance course, in the School of Economics & Finance at St Andrews. It has been developed to reflect the increasing interest in this area displayed by postgraduate applicants to St Andrews, allied to a long standing tradition, within this University, of placing our graduates in a wide variety of posts in the financial community. This is commonplace for the UK, Europe, and North America, and is becoming increasingly true of further afield, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Thailand. St Andrews has a deep tradition in this area, dating back one hundred years, to W R Scott's famous work on the form and finance of joint-stock companies, and the genesis of speculative crises. Today, we have a well established group of staff who are active in teaching, research and publishing in finance, over a broad range of topics.
The aim of the programme is to help to develop the qualities of students who come here, so that they will have a learning experience that will make them up to date, clear thinking, analytically skilled, well trained, and possessed of both the capacity for creative work in finance, and the practical ability to address real world problems, in a variety of institutional contexts.
There are two types of students on this programme. Some are on the Postgraduate Diploma in Finance course, which runs full-time for two semesters. They are appraised by both continuous assessment during the teaching of modules and by their performance in end of semester examinations in January and May. Others are on the MSc in Finance course which runs full-time for the full academic year. They are appraised by continuous assessment, end of semester examinations in January and May and by a dissertation of at least 10,000 words (but no longer than 15,000 words) which is returned by the end of August. A basic requirement is that both Diploma and MSc students must gain a total of 120 credits from modules taken.
All candidates take three compulsory modules in Finance in the first semester, and one compulsory module in the second semester. Each module carries a credit weight of 20 credits. They must then study two further optional modules in the second semester, each of 20 credit weight. Candidates select from the optional modules listed below. Both Diploma and MSc candidates are appraised by continuous assessment and an examination paper in each module. Examinations occur at the end of the semester in which a module is taught.Subject to performance students may proceed to write the 60 credit Dissertation for the MSc in Finance.
PRELIMINARY READING
It is expected that all students will have studied and mastered a significant body of the preliminary reading, as given below.The Economist, The Financial Times and their associated website and pages are a good way to grasp contemporary insights, examples and issues.
As a general introduction to studies in finance, we recommend:
Damodaran, Aswath (2001) Corporate Finance: theory and practice (2nd edn),
New York: Wiley.
Lighter reading is:
Dunbar, Nicholas (2001) Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital
Management and the Legends behind it, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
