From ICEF to Cambridge. The Story of Alisa Vakhitova, ICEF Graduate of 2024
– Thinking back to the time when you were to choose your university, why did you choose ICEF? What mattered most in your choice of the programme?
As luck would have it, ICEF is our family tradition: both my brothers studied here. But in my case the choice of ICEF was a conscious one, it wasn’t made in advance. ICEF’s bachelor’s programme definitely stood out among its Russian counterparts. I sought a degree that would combine the academic depth with hands-on nature to the curriculum—exactly what ICEF offered at the time. With English as the language of instruction, a double-degree programme, a wide array of courses catering to multiple specializations, free extra language courses, and applied electives that were not available elsewhere within HSE, ICEF had already established itself as a domestically and internationally recognized brand.
– What was the ICEF student community like and its atmosphere? Did they live up to your expectations and what was your best experience?
I have a lot of fond memories of ICEF. We were a close-knit class. There was always someone to prepare for exams or to just spend time with outside the classroom. I remember how we stayed up late figuring out probability theory, melting down over the time-consuming Excel and VBA tasks. We would get mad doing those 20-point-long home assignments in Macro, and our debit/credit math was often hit-and-miss. We all would get together to watch the hours-long Financial Intermediation sessions to prepare for the exam.
Still, my student life was about more than just studying. I still don’t understand how they talked me into running a 10-kilometer distance at 8 a.m., followed by a few more marathons through Moscow parks... We would go skating, tour GES-2 and the Pushkin Museum, play Quiz, Please!, watch selections of the Beat Film Festival, listen to LRK Trio jazz band, and dance all night at ICEF Crew parties. It was an amazingly exciting time.
– Which skills and knowledge from ICEF are you using most in your current academic and research work?
With me, staying effective in any field of activity rests on four pillars—ability to think and source solutions in new contexts; fundamental curiosity; discipline; and performance under pressure or in highly competitive environments.
ICEF is ruled by healthy competition, stimulating its students to set more ambitious goals and move towards them. The coursework is highly demanding, with endless homework and projects designed to cultivate perseverance and time management skills. The training as rigorous as this leads one to rethink their limitations: there are absolutely no constraints on what you can achieve.
– Who of your ICEF teachers had a particularly strong influence on your professional mindset and choice of a career?
My top-priority courses at ICEF were those that embraced the quantitative field. One of them—Statistics, taught by Prof. Yaroslav Lyulko—became my central focus and key tool in both my workplace and academic study. Similar in spirit was Econometrics. I coped with it just fine, thanks to the well-structured lectures by Prof. Oleg Zamkov and the seminars by Prof. Nadezhda Kanygina. I liked that this Econometrics course wasn’t limited solely to theory. It was meant to teach us how to collect and critically evaluate models based on the real properties of data.
Of the Y4 courses, my favourites were Financial Mathematics (taught by Prof. Yaroslav Lyulko) and Quantitative Finance (taught by Prof. Daniil Yesaulov). They inspired my choice of graduation thesis topic. And, in order to expand my analytical tools arsenal, I took a machine learning elective by Prof. Alexey Boldyrev. It did turn out to be a real challenge but helped me greatly when writing my thesis, representing also a useful line on my Yandex resume.
– You completed ICEF Academia (an optional programme for ICEF students seeking careers in academia – ed.) and even were its top-performing student in your second year. How has this programme benefitted you?
This programme was my opportunity to try myself on an academic track. It is a two-part programme, one part offering an in-depth study of the core courses (Economic Thinking, Calculus++, Advanced Statistics) and the other hosting research seminars with the professors of ICEF. Those seminars were a great way to learn how to read, analyse, and present articles on economics, game theory, and finance. ICEF Academia has shaped my understanding of what academic career is about, I am now aware of scientific papers’ structural design and the current trends in research. My being ICEF Academia’s Y2 top-performing student came as a fortunate gain: I was able to do a 3-week course in LSE Summer School (London), with all expenses covered by ICEF.
– Alisa, you are now a Cambridge student. Can you tell more about your programme and how your experience at Cambridge is different from your previous school?
Cambridge offers two programmes in Finance — MFin and MPhil. The former is for those who would like to go to work in the industry, and the latter (my choice) is for seekers of an academic track and a prerequisite for a PhD. I’m in a class of 23, about 80% being boys. Structurally, the training differs greatly from the one I experienced at ICEF. Here, homework and seminars are replaced by independent reading, presentation, and discussion of articles—a total of about ten per week. The final grades are determined fully by end-of-year examination (demo exams like those at ICEF aren’t practiced here), an essay or a reviewer’s report. Here, learned theories represent some 30% of your success, with the rest depending solely on your cognitive skills, ie your ability to translate knowledge onto new contexts and interpret the results. A three-hour econometrics test, for instance, may involve a mini-study requiring you to identify key issues and provide a rationale for your chosen model and its optimal parameters. And you cannot appeal or have your paper revised here. Nor does Cambridge have a student rating practice — all you know is your personal scores and the overall average for the class.
– You have enrolled in a PhD programme. Why did you choose academia and what prospects are there for you in it?
I see academia as an opportunity to learn new things and pass them on through teaching. Any research study begins with identifying gaps in previous literature—a stage that has always required extra effort from me. This past November our faculty professors hosted a session where they shared their research progress and some curious results. That session proved pivotal for me. While I was never interested in corporate finance as an ICEF student, one of the presenters suddenly sparked my interest. This is how I arrived at the topic of my PhD research proposal. Next, I did an hour-long interview conducted by a panel of eight professors, which has probably been my toughest interview ever. The competitive pressure was relentless. My proposal turned out to be the only one that received a funding offer. And the other day I won a central scholarship.
Doing research is attractive because it offers intellectual freedom. While it’s completely natural for interests to change, nothing compares to the moment of inspiration when you find a worthwhile topic, or the euphoria from an empirical result or finally establishing a cause-and-effect relationship where no one expected it. I don’t know yet where my PhD path leads, but my goal for the next few years is to write a strong job market paper.
– Talking about your current research study, what exactly does it explore?
Well, we know stocks as a financial asset entitling its holders to dividends. But in fact, they are also entitled to vote, ie decide on key corporate issues such as management appointment or expenditures. The votes are normally ‘dormant’ and have little influence on price, but every time the major shareholders struggle for control, their value soars—sometimes even higher than that of dividends. We can’t know directly how much in the market price is represented by the voting power, but there are mathematical methods to measure it.
My study explores what makes votes a source of power in the face of competition for company control and how this knowledge can be used by market participants.
– If you could travel back in time, what would you advise to applicants caught in two minds about whether to enroll in ICEF?
If financial opportunities permit, then definitely go for ICEF. If you are ruminating on ‘What if it’s going to be hard, the answer is ‘Yes, it is going to be hard’. But view your challenges, risks, and having to get out of your comfort zone as your opportunities to become a different person, grow and achieve things you never even dreamed of.
Even if you still doubt your choice of finance — it’s normal for your interests to change multiple times—the best that you can do as a university student is invest in your development. ICEF offers everything you need for it. Take electives, learn languages and programming, do courses that are challenging, and try new things.
And one more piece of advice: don’t try to combine study with work. You will never again have this time you can dedicate to learning new things. The ‘right moment’ is a myth. You have your whole life to work. You won’t fall behind, you will just start from a higher point.
