Alexandre Lauwers

The Joint Program UCL/UNamur/UNIGE offers a highly relevant combination – it helps you acquire a good knowledge of financial markets together with a sound economic intuition. This highly quantitative program is particularly appealing as it offers a genuine fusion of macro and micro capabilities as well as a strong foundation of capital markets with fundamental finance theories, models, pricing and a precious understanding on their up-to-date applications. You will acquire some essential quantitative skills and a good handling on useful econometric softwares (OxMetrics, Stata, Matlab). While compulsory courses will give a firm grounding in numerical methods in finance and economic principles, the program offers a rich variety of elective courses in interesting areas. For instance, "Financial Crises" and "Monetary Theory & Policy", made the program highly valuable to me as it matches my field of preferred expertise and career goals. The learning environment is also very stimulating. Courses are given in small, international group of people and in modern well-equipped classrooms. Professors and assistants are particularly accessible, always willing to help you, and encourage students to think out of the box. As a human-sized city and with multicultural population, Geneva is very pleasant to live in, not to
mention the lake and the Alps nearby. This programme is very challenging, yet challenges are made to be overcome!