Cambridge MPhil Finance Supplemental Essay Example: Same Field Deepening (Score 93)

The MPhil Finance at Cambridge will let me formalise the quantitative methods I began developing during my financial mathematics degree at the University of Nairobi. Drafting a systemic risk policy memo sharpened my applied skills, yet it also exposed gaps in stochastic calculus and empirical asset pricing that the programme's core sequence directly addresses. Specific modules—Financial Econometrics and Topics in Asset Pricing—map onto my central aim: building rigorous, policy-relevant risk models for emerging markets. Access to Cambridge's data infrastructure will extend the quantitative analysis and applied project work I completed in Nairobi into a more controlled empirical setting. For a dissertation, I intend to model contagion channels across East African banking networks using spatial or network econometrics. The key identification threat is endogenous network formation; I plan to exploit regulatory variation across jurisdictions as an instrument, a strategy the programme's econometrics training will equip me to evaluate critically.