UCL MSc Finance personal statement: a successful essay analysed

Many Ukrainians who fled the war and made the UK their home now face a second, quieter challenge: managing their money in a financial system they do not understand. Watching fellow citizens go through this shaped my goal of building a firm that makes financial advice and investing accessible to refugee communities. The MSc Finance at University College London is the step I need to get there.

The hardest decision in that model was not the cash flow forecast but the discount rate. I had to price the risk of a business operating in a war zone, and nothing I had learned gave me a defensible way to estimate the country risk premium. […] How to value a business, and price an investment, under extreme and hard-to-quantify risk is the question I now want to answer.

The Asset Pricing and Quantitative Finance modules address what my DCF left open: how risk should be measured and reflected in the return investors require.

Many Ukrainians who fled the war and made the UK their home now face a second, quieter challenge: managing their money in a financial system they do not understand. Watching fellow citizens go through this shaped my goal of building a firm that makes financial advice and investing accessible to refugee communities. The MSc Finance at University College London is the step I need to get there.

My interest in finance began at Bentley University, where the Introduction to Finance module first showed me how financial ratios and stock price volatility reveal the health of a company. During a study abroad semester at Università Cattolica in Milan, I learned to price bonds and studied how Special Purpose Vehicles are used in private equity. I am now building on this at Hult International Business School through the Investment Banking and Derivatives and Risk Management modules. Together, these courses taught me how to value a company in a stable market. My work experience showed me where those tools stop working.

As a Capital Analyst at a distribution firm in Kharkiv, I worked on restructuring the company's capital after the war cut its revenue by 30%. I built a DCF valuation to identify its least promising branch and coordinated with several departments to gather the data behind it. The hardest decision in that model was not the cash flow forecast but the discount rate. I had to price the risk of a business operating in a war zone, and nothing I had learned gave me a defensible way to estimate the country risk premium. I made the most reasonable assumption I could, but I knew the whole valuation rested on a number I could not justify. How to value a business, and price an investment, under extreme and hard-to-quantify risk is the question I now want to answer.

Earlier, during an internship at a large-cap German renewable energy company, I rotated across departments: I compiled the annual report, managed daily accounts and forecast the European green energy and LNG markets, presenting my findings to the COO. It was my first experience of defending a forecast in front of the person who would act on it.

Three parts of University College's programme speak directly to this question. The Asset Pricing and Quantitative Finance modules address what my DCF left open: how risk should be measured and reflected in the return investors require. Wealth Management connects to the clients I plan to serve, whose priorities, from building a cash buffer to managing currency risk between the hryvnia and the pound, differ from those of a typical private-banking client. And the Finance Research Project would let me apply both to Ukraine. Alongside these, the programme's alignment with the CFA Program would complement my degree, and the Corporate Speaker Series would give me the chance to test my academic questions against practitioners' experience.

For my research project, I intend to ask how sustainable investment frameworks can attract private capital to Ukraine's reconstruction while appropriately pricing country and currency risk. The programme's joint delivery with the Department of Economics would allow me to approach this question from both a financial and an economic perspective, under the guidance of University College's faculty.

In the long term, my firm will start with what refugee households lack most: clear, trustworthy financial advice that takes their situation into account. For those ready to invest, it will offer simple, low-cost diversified funds with a transparent investment mandate designed to make the risks and objectives of investing easier for first-time investors to understand. This would help families build financial security and, by increasing their spending power, benefit the wider economy. The MSc Finance at University College would give me the tools to answer the question my DCF left open, and to build a firm that answers the one my fellow Ukrainians face every day.