Finance MS Program

MS in Finance alum built a career foundation through academic engagement

Katelynn C Hipolito — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:07:40 +0000

MS in Finance alum built a career foundation through academic engagement Katelynn C Hipolito Thu, 05/14/2026 - 10:07

During his undergraduate studies, Brian Gaydos, MS Finance ’25, took several finance classes that piqued his interest and led him to consider beginning a finance graduate program immediately after graduating.

Brian Gaydos, MS Finance ’25. Photo by Hannah Patterson/Costello College of Business

After learning about the faculty’s academic research and industry experience, as well as the campus’s location and the program’s convenience, his decision was sealed, and he enrolled in the Master of Science in F inance program at the Costello College of Business at ��ɫ��Ƶ.

“George Mason has a great recruiting base. I think that attending these networking events is something that really helped kickstart my career.”

— Brian Gaydos, MS Finance ’25

In the hybrid program, Gaydos made sure to attend in person almost every time, taking two classes at a time each eight-week semester. He found the faculty exceeded his expectations, especially in the courses taught by Tiago Requeijo, instructional assistant professor of finance, and Derek Horstmeyer, instructional professor of finance.

Gaydos took Statistical and Quantitative Methods for Finance, as well as Managerial Economics and Decisions of the Firm, with Requeijo. In Quantitative Methods, he developed a strong foundation in applying statistical and quantitative techniques to financial data, strengthening his ability to analyze trends and make data-driven decisions using Python. Through Managerial Economics, he gained a deeper understanding of how firms approach pricing, cost structures, and strategic decision-making in competitive markets. Together, these classes played a key role in shaping his ability to approach financial and business problems with both analytical rigor and a strategic perspective.

Gaydos was also particularly impacted by classes and mentorship from Horstmeyer. In the Student Managed Investment Fund course, students actively manage a real investment portfolio, conduct equity research, and present investment recommendations. Through this experience, Gaydos gained hands-on exposure to portfolio construction, valuation, and risk analysis while developing the ability to communicate and defend investment ideas in a professional setting. The course emphasized real-world application, requiring students to collaborate on investment decisions and engage with financial tools and market data. Gaydos also completed research assistant work for Horstmeyer, which was published in The Wall Street Journal.

While enrolled at Costello, Gaydos gained another perspective on the material he was studying and researching as a teaching assistant for two 400-level finance courses. “When you’re on the side where you’re explaining and teaching concepts to other people, it really reinforces your own learning. As you answer questions, it makes you think deeply about the material,” he says.

Among Gaydos’s favorite experiences at Costello was the Costello Fellows on Wall Street trip to New York City, where he visited several firms and networked with local alumni. He took advantage of many other opportunities including joining the Mason Consulting Group and competing in the CFA Research Challenge. In addition to these extracurricular experiences, Gaydos attended networking events, like the Meet the Firms on-campus event, where he made a connection that led to landing a financial analyst role shortly after graduating. “George Mason has a great recruiting base,” he says. “I think that attending these networking events is something that really helped kickstart my career.”

Currently, Gaydos is a financial analyst at Brookfield Residential, a leading North American land developer and homebuilder for more than 65 years. His chief responsibilities revolve around conducting competitive analyses for single-family housing communities across the Northeast, performing variance analyses, and supporting quarterly financial reporting.

“It’s interesting to be able to see inside the business and to plan ahead strategically,” he says. Financial modeling skills that he developed in his corporate finance class, such as forecasting and valuation, have become integral to his role.

By taking advantage of experiential learning opportunities, student organizations, research roles, and networking events, Brian Gaydos forged connections and deepened his understanding of finance, ensuring that his education was not limited to the classroom. He is particularly interested in exploring fields such as investment banking, private equity, and corporate strategy, where he can apply his financial modeling and analytical skills to evaluate investments, drive strategic decisions, and create long-term value. As he continues his professional journey, Gaydos remains confident that the strong foundation he built at Costello will continue to support his career success.

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MS in Finance students answer burning investment questions

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 17:08:48 +0000

MS in Finance students answer burning investment questions Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 10/22/2024 - 13:08

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Derek Horstmeyer

��ɫ��Ƶ Master of Science in Finance students have the rare opportunity to use their budding analytical skills to solve some of the mysteries of today’s financial markets. Moreover, their faculty-supervised research projects can land their names in the pages of The Wall Street Journal.

To date, these projects have spawned nearly 40 WSJ articles, not to mention dozens of write-ups in outlets such as MarketWatch, The Conversation, and the CFA Institute blog. They have also received television coverage on CNN and NewsNation.

SMIF officers Yashkaran Sidhu, Jonathan Pino, Matthew Rickard, Raheeg Joari, and Reema Hammad at the Chicago SMIFC conference.

As Costello College of Business finance professor Derek Horstmeyer tells it, the process started taking shape organically. “I had started writing for the CFA and The Wall Street Journal. In my talks with my students, some of them revealed they had research interests. It just kind of took off from there—I would bring it up in class and offer to supervise a research project that would last about a week.”

Student researchers are mainly recruited from Horstmeyer’s Montano Student Managed Investment Fund (SMIF) class, a hands-on exercise in security analysis and portfolio construction that serves as a capstone to the MS in finance degree.

While many student research projects originate with questions suggested by the students themselves, Horstmeyer helps the student teams devise their scope and direction.

“They might say, for example, that they’re interested in crypto. So I’ll show them previous articles on crypto and we kind of develop a new idea from there,” Horstmeyer says.

By the time they get to SMIF, students are usually comfortable getting their hands dirty with data. Finding the appropriate data-set for the question they’ve posed, however, can be a challenge. That’s another area where Horstmeyer’s support becomes critical. “The big bottleneck is they just don’t know where the data is,” he says. “We as faculty have access to these private databases. So I’ll guide them or set up the data.”

Horstmeyer also introduces the student teams to the best methods for parsing the data, while leaving students enough leeway to conduct independent follow-up analyses if needed.

Of the dozens of projects completed thus far, there are a few that, for Horstmeyer, typify the process at its best. For example, finance students Matthew Rickard and Camila Marín Builes investigated how stock-market trends fare once they have been familiarized enough to warrant a nickname. Among the eight named trends included in the study were FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), and “The Magnificent Seven” (Nvidia, Tesla, Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft).

“We did an extensive Google search to find the biggest named trends. Then we used the Wayback Machine to figure out when the trend was first coined, like the exact date. We did all sorts of tests to determine what kind of abnormal returns you can expect if you stick with that trend,” Horstmeyer explains.

The students found that newly christened trends experience an extended honeymoon period of about 12 months, amounting to an average of 13 percentage points in excess returns. But in their second year, trends start to go stale, underperforming the S&P 500 by an average of two points.

The Wall Street Journal published Horstmeyer’s article “Once a Hot Stock-Market Trend Has a Name, Its Best Days Are Likely Past”—published under his byline with the student researchers mentioned by name early on—in March 2024.

Horstmeyer says that participating in these projects helps students hone skills and techniques that enhance their careers and give them a competitive edge in the job market. “I get employers reaching out and saying, ‘I saw this line item on a candidate’s resume saying they did some pretty high-level data analysis for you. Is it true?’ They’re kind of surprised the student contributed to the CFA or a Wall Street Journal article.”

Melvin Jonathan Reyes Echeverria, who completed his MS in finance degree in May 2024, says, “I assisted Professor Horstmeyer with data analysis for the WSJ and the experience was amazing…I was able to leverage everything that I was taught in my MS in finance classes. It was a privilege to be published and something that was unexpected to receive at George Mason.”

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Second master’s degree lets Mason graduate exercise a different part of his brain

ckearney — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 15:33:18 +0000

Second master’s degree lets Mason graduate exercise a different part of his brain ckearney Mon, 12/12/2022 - 10:33

Paul Vosti is the first to tell you he doesn’t need another degree.

He already has a BA in Japanese studies from the University of Notre Dame, and an MA in international studies from the University of Washington. But Vosti also loves learning. So when the opportunity arose, he dove in.

Mason graduate student Paul Vosti. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services

Later this month, the 65-year-old Burke, Virginia, resident will graduate from ��ɫ��Ƶ with a master’s degree in finance, part of the program’s first cohort of 14 students.

“There is a sense of accomplishment,” Vosti said. “But honestly, I don’t even know if I’m going to turn this into a professional career opportunity as much as just the experience of the education, which I love. I love going to school.”

Vosti hadn’t been in a traditional civilian academic setting since 1989, when he graduated from Washington. A military career followed, including stints as the senior advisor of Guam policy and the director for Japan policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

He is currently working part-time as a contracting officer’s representative, administering contracts for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. All of which is to say, Vosti had some catching up to do when it came to current tools of education.

“When I came to the University of Notre Dame as a freshman, we all came with portable electric typewriters. That was our technology,” Vosti said.

For his finance classes, all of which were online, Vosti had to learn software such as Python and RStudio, and advanced capabilities of Excel for inputting formulas.

He had to get comfortable with the functions of a financial calculator and, as he said, “get that heavy layer of rust off” in classes that included a heavy dose of calculus.

Lin Sun, an assistant professor in the finance section of Mason’s School of Business, said that did not hold back her student.

“What is unique about Paul is that when he studies something new, he would really dig into it and ask a lot of questions until he understood every detail of the underlying mechanism,” Sun said. “That is the quality that makes him stand out in anything he is determined to achieve.”

“He’s not afraid to push forward, and he’s a role model for other students,” said associate professor Jim Hsieh, the director of the master’s in finance program. “I’m convinced that he convinced other students that if you put your mind to something you can achieve it.”

The truth is, studying finance is a return to Vosti’s youthful interests.

When Vosti began at Notre Dame, he intended to major in mathematics. When he switched majors to Japanese studies due to his strong interest in international relations, math was set aside.

“But I always had that interest, playing with numbers,” Vosti said, “And I was always interested in the financial markets. So for me, this was an opportunity to go back to something I had an interest in, and it would all be new knowledge.”

Vosti attended Mason in great part, he said, because the finance program was supportive, encouraging, and worked with his G.I. Bill requirements. It also allowed him to finish the program in 15 months to accommodate a long-planned vacation.

“I just liked the heck out of it,” Vosti said of the program. “This was like exercising a different part of my brain. I’ve enjoyed the journey as much as what it might open to me.”

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New Partnership Eases Transition to Grad School

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 15:40:22 +0000

New Partnership Eases Transition to Grad School Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 03/16/2022 - 11:40

Matt Van Horn

The ��ɫ��Ƶ School of Business recently set up a unique admission partnership with the University of Virginia at Wise. The pathway offers students who graduate from UVA-Wise the ability to streamline their applications to the master’s in accounting, master’s in finance, and master’s in management (MSM).

The master’s in management is designed for non-business majors who seek a foundation in business management. Program benefits include access to world-class faculty, individual advising and lifelong career coaching. Over the course of 11 months, MSM students will earn a master’s in management, complete an internship (150 hours), and participate in a global residency.

"The MSM program provides a unique opportunity to combine the diverse perspectives of the non-business undergraduate degrees with the targeted foundation in both the theory and practical application of business in areas such as organizational behavior, economics, finance, marketing, and others," says Victoria M Grady, associate professor of organizational behavior and academic director of the MSM Program. "It is exciting to be part of such a dynamic program. We are thrilled to share integrated partnerships with schools such as UVA-Wise."

Matt Van Horn, a student in the (MSM) program, is the first student to come through this pathway to Mason. When asked why he chose the pathway, Van Horn says it was because of Mason’s reputation and the easy nature of the application process.

“I always knew I wanted to go to grad school, but the graduate application process can be overwhelming,” Van Horn says. “The UVA-Wise pathway was almost too good to be true. It was like a yellow brick road through all the confusion.”

According to Van Horn, the MSM program has benefits that may not be obvious initially. The business school’s Office of Career Services is a “true benefit,” he says, and the staff works closely to meet student wants and needs. He emphasizes the excellent networking opportunities with other professionals in the Washington, D.C., area.

When asked how the MSM helped him develop, Van Horn says he now has a more realistic idea of the scope of the business world and the skills he needs to continue developing to be successful. “It allowed me to take what I already knew from undergrad and build on it,” he says.

He added that the professors are friendly and want their students to succeed, which he considers a strength of the program. Van Horn’s advice for students who are considering a School of Business master’s program is to reach out to any of the staff or faculty for more information.

If you would like your college or university to benefit from a similar partnership or pathway, please contact Kevin Connor, associate director of graduate admission, strategic initiatives in the School of Business.