How Yale SOM Gave Purpose to my Career Path

When I arrived in New Haven to begin the Asset Management program at Yale SOM, I thought I knew why I was here.

I wanted to strengthen my finance skill set and deepen my understanding of investment analysis, quantitative investing, portfolio construction, and risk management. With a background in consulting, corporate finance, and research, I had experience working with data, models, and business problems. What I did not expect was how much Yale would change the way I understand finance itself.

Before this program, I often saw finance through the lens of analysis: valuation, risk, return, data, models, and market behavior. The Asset Management program gave me something deeper. It helped me understand finance as a bridge between business and society.

At its core, finance is about allocating resources to their most productive uses. The work of asset management—directing capital toward companies, innovations, and ideas that can create long-term value—sits at the center of that process. Done well, it can support economic growth, improve market efficiency, and serve both clients and society. As our program director, Toby Moskowitz, has often stated, asset management is one of the careers where you can “do good and do well” at the same time.

That sentence captured something I came to understand more deeply through this program. Fiduciary responsibility and social impact are not opposing ideas. Investing for clients requires discipline, stewardship, and long-term thinking, and those same principles can help capital flow toward productive and meaningful uses.

In the Asset Management program, we learn to apply these big ideas through a deeply quantitative and mathematical finance curriculum. Through the core courses, I became much more comfortable moving between theory and implementation. We worked with factor models, covariance matrices, portfolio optimization, time-series predictability, volatility modeling, machine-learning methods, and empirical tests of investment signals. In many classes, we got our hands dirty with data, using coding to clean datasets, run backtests, evaluate strategies, and see how theoretical ideas behave in real markets. Professors refused to let us stay at the level of broad market commentary, pushing us to work through the math behind investment decisions at every turn so that we could truly understand why a particular strategy works, when it stops working, and what risks are hidden underneath.

Several electives expanded my interdisciplinary and practical understanding of the field:

Hedge Fund Strategies with Andrea Frazzini and Ronen Israel made quantitative investing feel concrete through real-data backtesting, performance measurement, and discussions of liquidity, margin, funding risk, and implementation constraints.

Macroeconomic Strategies with Jordan Brooks from AQR Capital Management gave me a structured view of global macro investing across equities, bonds, currencies, and commodities.

Private Equity: Leveraged Buyouts with Joshua Cascade broadened my perspective beyond public markets through deal team work, due diligence, LBO modeling, downside cases, and investment memoranda, teaching me how investors assess businesses, structure transactions, and create value.

What made these classes especially powerful was the consistent emphasis on real-world applications. The math, coding, and modeling always pointed back to a real investment question: What is the source of return? What risk are we taking? Is the relationship economically meaningful? Would this strategy survive transaction costs and changing market conditions? How do investors behave during turbulent times, and how can we help them make better long-term decisions?

Another highlight of the Asset Management program is the regular Colloquium, which brings leading executives, investors, allocators, and practitioners to campus for candid discussions about the industry. I came to understand the big intellectual questions driving the field by hearing from leaders such as Cliff Asness, founder and CIO of AQR Capital Management; Matt Mendelsohn, Yale University’s CIO; and Charles D. Ellis, a former Vanguard board member.

These conversations showed me that investing is not only about being smart with numbers. It is about trust. It is about responsibility. It is about making sound decisions on behalf of important institutions, including universities, pension funds, and foundations.

The wider Yale community also gave me the freedom to explore beyond business school. One day, I might be sharing a meal with law students while conversing about the intersection of finance and law in shaping a better society. Another, I might hear from visiting medical students about how thoughtful asset allocation and investment in innovation can create value. Those moments reminded me that, when informed by perspectives from other fields, finance has the power to shape the world for the better. This interdisciplinary environment was a tremendous benefit during recruiting. The preparation I received at Yale SOM, both academically and professionally, helped me take the next step in my career. I was grateful to accept a post-graduation role at Morgan Stanley, where I’m thrilled to expand my career in finance and investment management.

Looking back, I’ve gained a deeper knowledge of finance, and a more mature and disciplined lens on the field. I now understand asset management as a profession built on analytical rigor, fiduciary responsibility, intellectual humility, and the patience required for long-term judgment. As I head into my next chapter, Yale SOM’s mission of educating leaders for business and society is far more than a phrase—it’s a way of understanding the profession I’ve entered.

Dan Xu is a recipient of the Swensen Scholarship in Asset Management (​2025–2026).