Wisconsin Ties Harvard in Producing
Top CEOs

What attracted you to a teaching position at UW-Madison?

I feel a strong connection to the university because I went here as an undergrad. It has always been a world-class university with great faculty. The organizations and specialization of the School of Business today is making a big difference in the quality of the education for the students and the competitiveness of the program.

Terry Maxwell
Faculty Member
Retired Managing Director
Robert W. Baird

School of Business > ACFIN >

The specialized Nicholas Center for Corporate Finance and Investment Banking combines the breadth of an outstanding first-year core curriculum with the depth of a specialized consulting project-based experience in the second year. The Nicholas Center is the only truly applied corporate finance MBA program in the country. Why is Wisconsin's specialized MBA approach gaining international recognition? According to BusinessWeek, specialized programs "give students the kind of targeted, real-world experience sometimes lacking in traditional MBAs."

The Nicholas MBA program offers students a unique opportunity to gain practical experience working on meaningful corporate finance consulting engagements. Nicholas MBA students work in teams on assigned finance projects for consulting firms, investment banks, public corporations and private companies. The financial consulting engagements typically involve an analysis of problem areas for the engagement sponsors in areas such as working capital management, evaluation of funding sources, valuation, cost of capital, capital expenditure decisions, acquisition analysis, and joint venture and strategic alliances. Throughout the academic year, each student typically works on 4-6 diverse finance consulting engagements. Overall, each class works with 16 -18 different corporations, firms and banks.

Our graduates become financial leaders in all areas of corporate finance and investment banking.

Is Corporate Finance for you?

Do you have?
Initiative
Exceptional communication skills
Excellent analytical skills
People skills
Creativity

Do you enjoy?
Solving problems
Being a decision-maker
Working on teams
Working in a fast-paced environment

Are you?
Passionate

Finance Career Titles

Mission

  • To offer Corporate Finance and Investment Banking MBA students an opportunity to work directly on a variety of real-world corporate finance problems
  • To help students develop their leadership, negotiation, presentation, problem-solving, communication and teamwork skills through critical analysis of corporate finance problems
  • To teach Corporate Finance and Investment Banking MBA students how to apply technical and theoretical financial tools and concepts to analyze unstructured problems, improve decision-making and develop recommendations based upon their assessment of alternative courses of action


Academic Director Jim Seward with Nicholas team in New York
1999
Nicholas Center - First MBA program in the country that focuses exclusively on practical training in
corporate finance
What's Grown 800% Since 1999? Hint: It's Not the Stock Market. A Retrospective by Nicholas Center for Corporate Finance and Investment Banking (formerly ACFIN) Academic Director Professor Jim Seward The Wisconsin Idea: Bridging Theory, Realty of High-Stakes Corporate Finance