Global Finance
Introducing the Georgetown M.S. in Global Finance
The M.S. in Global Finance (MGF) is a premier online master’s degree offered by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business exclusively to working professionals at leading firms in India. The MGF builds upon the school’s top-ranked online M.S. in Finance program and is customized for students seeking to gain the benefits of attending a renowned U.S. university without the need to leave their job or move abroad.
Spanning 19 months, the program is offered online through asynchronous lessons developed by Georgetown’s renowned business faculty, as well as weekly live classes where students apply what they have learned to real-world cases, which focus on Indian firms and markets. Small class sizes help build community, and two in-person residencies in Dubai expand your global mindset.
The result? You will be ready to advance your career, either by growing within an existing role or pivoting into another role within your organization or at a new firm.
Benefits of the Program
Exclusive Access
The MGF program is open only to employees of select organizations in India.
Work-Life Balance
Students can obtain a premier master’s degree from a U.S. school without pausing their careers. The online format also provides the flexibility to complete asynchronous course content at a time convenient to you within each week.
Small Class Sizes
The MGF program is designed to maximize learning, including through small weekly live classes that yield meaningful class discussions.
Top Rankings
The MGF program is based on Georgetown’s top-ranked online M.S. in Finance program, which is regularly ranked among the top 10 U.S. MSF programs by QS.
Return on Investment
MGF is modeled after Georgetown McDonough’s MSF program, which has a proven track record of alumni career success in terms of promotions and salary increases.
Network Building
Students build connections with other emerging financial leaders in the region and will join the global Georgetown University network of more than 220,000 alumni upon graduation.
Prepare to Lead the Future of Global Finance
Over 19 months, the rigorous MGF curriculum will prepare you to lead the future of global finance. The first year begins with the most basic building block of finance — time value of money — and quickly moves on to stock and bond valuation. In each firstyear course, you will learn foundational lessons and quickly encounter more advanced topics. Secondyear courses build upon your newfound knowledge, provide elective course choices, and teach you about principled leadership. Two global residencies at the DIFC Academy in Dubai, new home of Georgetown McDonough in the region, will immerse you into global financial markets and provide you with the capstone Global Consulting Project course, where you work directly with a leading international firm.
Upon graduation, you will have a comprehensive understanding of financial markets, investment strategies, and corporate finance. You will learn to value bonds and stocks, analyze risk, and apply models like the CAPM and the Fama-French models. The curriculum covers diversification, mutual funds, ETFs, corporate governance, financial statement analysis, and many other topics. You will develop skills in statistical analysis, data-driven modeling, and risk management. The program also emphasizes ethical responsibilities, leadership, and international business, preparing you to solve complex financial problems and make informed business decisions.
M.S. in Global Finance
Curriculum
While rigorous and demanding, the curriculum and program structure are designed for busy working professionals.
• We have found that offering only one course at a time allows students to more deeply engage with the content.
• Each course has a standard structure so students quickly develop muscle memory on how the courses work, allowing them to focus on mastering the material.
• The professors have carefully developed the asynchronous materials with clear explanations, which empower working professionals to learn the material more quickly.
• Each course provides a clear roadmap for success with extensive homework problems (with detailed solutions, including Excel-based solutions and video solutions for many of the more challenging problems) to help students prepare for quizzes and exams.
• Office hours for each course during weekday evenings (IST) and/or weekends are available with both teaching assistants and professors.
Year 1
Pre-term
Orientation
Year 2
LEGEND
Core, 3 cr
Electives, 1.5 cr
Orientation/Signature Experiences
Students take the courses in sequence one at a time.
Fall Semester Spring Semester
Global Financial Markets
Global Corporate Finance
Global Financial Accounting Financial Econometrics
Global Financial Markets Residency Hybrid Online/In-Person (Dubai)
Fall Semester
Global Corporate Valuation & Modeling
Spring Semester
Global Investments & Fixed Income Principled Financial Leadership
First Elective
Second Elective
Global Consulting Project Hybrid Online/In-Person (Dubai)
Summer Semester
Global Derivatives & Risk Management
Global Residencies
The MGF program includes two international residencies, both located at the DIFC Academy in Dubai. These in-person, required courses will expand your knowledge, allow you to apply what you have learned, and ensure you create lasting relationships with your peers.
Global Financial Markets Residency
This course builds on the concepts and skills learned in the Global Financial Markets course through a deep dive into the investment industry, especially mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The course consists of online lectures and team meetings and concludes with the in-person component in Dubai. The cornerstone of the course is a team-based case competition. Besides spending much of the course gathering and analyzing data for their presentation, the students will receive coaching on their presentation skills. The course faculty will also advise the student teams in one-on-one sessions.
Global Consulting Project
The Global Consulting Project is the program’s capstone course where you apply the skills you have learned throughout the program to a real-world consulting project assigned by an international firm. You work in a team with three to four other classmates remotely for the first part of the course, then in-person for an immersive weekend of team meetings—held approximately halfway through the course to accelerate the teams’ progress—and, after more remote work, conclude the course with an online presentation of your team’s project analyses and recommendations for your client.
Meet the MGF Faculty
The asynchronous lessons for the MGF core courses have been created by the following full-time Georgetown University faculty:
Allan Eberhart* Professor of Finance
Senior Associate Dean, Graduate Programs in Finance
Allen Ammerman*
Assistant Teaching Professor of Finance Director of Academic Operations
James Angel*
Associate Professor of Finance
David McLean
William G. Droms Professor of Finance Finance Area Chair
Edward Soule
Associate Professor of Strategy and Ethics
Vicki Tang
Associate Professor of Accounting
*Also committed to teaching live classes. Additional faculty will be added as the program prepares to launch in India.
Jose-Luis Guerrero*
Associate Professor, Operations and Analytics
Accelerate Your Career
Built from the success of Georgetown’s decade-old MSF program, the MGF program inherits a track record of career success for its graduates. The MGF will prepare you for advancement within your current firm — either through a promotion or a pivot to a new area — or through new employment opportunities, regardless of whether you are just beginning your career or if you have decades of experience.
All MGF graduates benefit from access to the Georgetown University network of 220,000 alumni around the world. MSF graduates have secured jobs such as wealth manager, portfolio manager, CFO, entrepreneur, and CEO. Many MSF graduates also are executives and managers at a variety of non-finance firms, including in the hospitality, energy, manufacturing, tech, entertainment, and media industries.
105%
Increase in MSF average base salary*
113% 97%
Increase in MSF median base salary*
MSF Graduates who earned a promotion or accepted a new job
*MSF graduating class of 2023 statistics, for experienced working professionals, reporting outcomes between the time of admission and six months after graduation.
the MGF Admissions Process
Individuals from MGF organizational partners interested in applying for the MGF program will undergo Georgetown’s traditional holistic admissions process, which includes an application, standardized test result, transcript(s), and essays. Below is the full list of admissions requirements:
• Application Form (via online portal)
• GRE, GMAT, or CAT
• Official Academic Transcripts
• Official TOEFL or IELTS (if your bachelor’s degree instruction was not in English or if you are not a native English speaker)
• Statement of Purpose
• Video Essay
• Resume/Curriculum Vitae
• Recommendation Form
• Non-refundable Application Fee (waivers available for those who attend an information session)
MGF Course Descriptions
Required Courses
Global Financial Markets
This course begins with the building block concept of the time value of money, and quickly moves onto applying this concept to government bond valuation, Macauley and Modified duration, the shape of the yield curve, the relation between spot and forward rates of interest, and the relation between nominal and real returns. We then apply these skills to corporate bond and stock valuation with a deep dive on bond covenant provisions, the dividend discount model and the use of comparables in valuation. We next make a connection between these valuation approaches and the Markowitz efficient frontier method for constructing an optimal portfolio. The relation between the Markowitz method and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is our next topic followed by how to apply to CAPM for constructing an optimal portfolio and estimating a security’s expected return. We conclude with a detailed explanation of how markets work—and consequently how investors should invest—according to the efficient market hypotheses and the competing hypothesis of behavioral finance.
Global Financial Markets Residency
This course builds on the concepts and skills learned in the Global Financial Markets course through a deep dive into the investment
industry, especially mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The course consists of online lectures and team meetings and concludes with the in-person component in Dubai. The cornerstone of the course is a case competition where the students will be assigned to teams. Besides spending much of the course gathering and analyzing data for their presentation, the students will receive coaching on their presentation skills. The course faculty will also advise the student teams in one-on-one sessions.
Global Financial Accounting
Financial accounting refers to translating a firm’s economic activity into highly structured information about financial performance and condition. This information is highly structured because all firms apply generally the same GAAP standards—with important differences accounted for between Indian and U.S. GAAP—to produce the information, yielding financial data that are comparable across firms and across time. This class focuses on how we can use financial information to gain insights into firms’ financial performance and condition. This course seeks to teach you how to understand and communicate firm performance to outside stakeholders (e.g., current and prospective capital providers, business partners, employees, etc.) for your role as a future business leader.
Global Corporate Finance
This course is very generally focused on two questions. First, what investments should the firm make? Investments include projects within the firm, acquisitions of other companies, and corporate divestitures, which reverse prior investments. Second, how should those investments be financed? Both questions are approached from the perspective of maximizing the value of the firm. That is, we will develop the necessary analytical tools to choose investment and financing schemes that maximize the value of the firm. We will cover some related topics, however, developing the analytical tools to answer the corporate investment and financing decisions is the primary goal of the course.
Financial Econometrics
This course provides a preparatory, though comprehensive, perspective on statistical concepts, related techniques, and methods used extensively in business decision-making activities. The course draws from concepts and applied techniques in statistics aiming to develop competence in the interpretation and analysis of data and development of models. Topical issues and specific techniques covered include: concepts in probability and distributions; inferential statistics; and simple and multiple regression analysis. The focus of this course is regression analysis. All material
leading up to the topic of regression modeling and analysis is considered a prerequisite. Case studies and computer packages are used to illustrate and reinforce their applications of the regression topics considered.
Global Corporate Valuation and Modeling
This course covers advanced valuation topics such as the free cash flow and multiples approaches to equity valuation, as well as the use of accounting and market data to measure and manage the value of the firm.
Global Derivatives and Risk Management
The total global market value of derivative securities such as forwards, futures and options is exponentially greater than the value of stocks, which underscores the importance for all finance professionals to understand how these markets work, how these derivatives can be used, and how to value them. The course also explores specific applications of options in the corporate setting, including executive stock options and real options. Finally, the course examines how corporations can manage currency, commodity price, interest rate, and other risks they face in doing business in a multinational setting.
Global Investments and Fixed Income
This course is designed to introduce the student to investments and fixed-income securities. Topics include the identification and analysis of investment opportunities, portfolio analysis and optimization, the identification and execution of investment strategies, and the professional responsibilities of financial advisers and asset managers. While the equity markets often get more attention in the popular media, the fixed-income world is much larger in terms of both outstanding issues as well as annual issuance. Consequently, we will cover fixed-income duration and fixed-income portfolio construction. Although offered as one course, this course has two tracks. Both tracks will cover the fundamentals of investments and fixed-income securities. Students will self-select into either track and will have access to all the learning materials in both tracks. Students in each track will have separate material assignments but will meet in a common class time each week. The Personal and Private Wealth Management (PPWM) track will focus more on investment problems faced by individual investors, including retirement planning and spending. The Institutional Asset Management (IAM) track will focus more on investment problems faced by institutional asset managers, including various alpha generation strategies.
Principled Financial Leadership
Consistent with the mission of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, this course is designed to contribute to your development as principled leaders: women and men who act with integrity and have well-deserved reputations as honorable, humble, and caring individuals. The course will concentrate on three overlapping areas, organized around the following questions:
• Managerial moral responsibility: What do we owe morally to one another in a business context?
• Leading ethical performance: What is required to incline a group of people to play by the rules and act with integrity?
• Leading social performance: What does an organization owe to the people and places impacted by its activities?
To stimulate and structure your thinking, normative frameworks and empirical models will be introduced and applied.
Global Consulting Project
The Global Consulting Project is the program’s capstone course where you apply the skills you have learned throughout the program to a real-world consulting project assigned by an international firm. You work in a team with three to four other classmates remotely for the first part of the course, then in-person for an immersive weekend of team meetings—held approximately halfway through the course to accelerate the teams’ progress—and, after more remote work, conclude the course with an online presentation of your team’s project analyses and recommendations for your client.
Elective Courses
(1.5 credits each; students must complete a total of 3 credits)
Advanced Financial Modeling in Python
Elevate your modeling skills to drive strategic decision-making in dynamic markets. This course provides an overview of fundamental concepts and techniques for building predictive models in Python. After gaining an understanding of machine learning problem formulation and evaluation metrics, you will train predictive models, focusing on regression for time-series forecasting. Throughout the course, you will be immersed in hands-on Python programming exercises and should emerge with marketable technology skills. Applied Data Science for Finance in Python—or a course the professor judges to be comparable—is a prerequisite for this course.
Applied Data Science for Finance in Python
Data science is an emerging field that is being applied across several business contexts, including finance. In this course, you will build the skills necessary to effectively navigate and analyze financial data sets in Python, empowering you to make data-driven decisions. After gaining confidence in wrangling real-world financial datasets at scale, you will apply statistical techniques to financial data, to perform analyses such as calculating betas for a large database of firms’ stock returns. Through group project deliverables, you will perform real-world financial analysis of interest, and practice communicating and presenting your analytical findings. Throughout the course, you will be immersed in hands-on Python programming exercises and should emerge with marketable technology skills. Introduction to Financial Applications in Python—or a course the professor judges to be comparable—is a prerequisite for this course.
Big Data
Big data is a relative term—data today are big by reference to the past, and to the methods and devices available to deal with them. The challenge big data presents is often characterized by the four V’s—volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. Volume refers to the amount of data. Velocity refers to the flow rate—the speed at which it is being generated and changed. Variety refers to the different types of data being generated (currency, dates, numbers, text, etc.). Veracity refers to the fact that data is being generated by organic distributed processes (e.g., millions of people signing up for services or free downloads) and not subject to the controls or quality checks that apply to data collected for a study.
Introduction to Financial Modeling in Python
Finance professionals can write application software programs to perform analyses, aid decision-making, and drive competitive advantage. In this introductory course, you will learn how to develop practical financial applications in the Python programming language. After gaining familiarity with basic programming concepts, you will practice processing, analyzing, and visualizing data, including real-time financial and market data from the Internet. Throughout the course, you will be immersed in hands-on Python programming exercises and should emerge with marketable technology skills.
Additional electives may be offered.