Earnings Call: Clay Randolph, Director of the Master of Finance

At any given point, you can find Clay Randolph walking through the halls of Goldring/ Woldenberg II meeting with the faculty who make the Tulane MFIN one of the most competitive programs in the country. As the Director of the MFIN program, Mr. Randolph is charged with the task of acting as the liaison between admissions, faculty and the career management center. With such responsibility, Mr. Randolph is constantly on the move, but I was able to sit with him and discuss the future of the A.B. Freeman School of Business’s MFIN program in this week’s edition of “Earnings Call.”
Q: How did your career path lead you toward becoming the Director of the Master of Finance program here at The A.B. Freeman School of Business?
A: Well, I graduated from the University of Arkansas with my Bachelors before attending law school at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. After law school, I practiced corporate and securities law for 12 years. I decided to pursue my MBA at Tulane in 1999. After earning my MBA, I spent five years at UBS on the institutional consulting side in wealth management and another five years with J.P. Morgan wealth management. I started as the MFIN Director in September 2012 and I have loved every day.
Q: In your opinion, what is the most important goal that the Master of Finance faculty is trying to achieve in the next year?
A: Jobs. I would say that the single most important thing for us, the administration and faculty, is to equip Tulane MFIN candidates with the skills necessary for the careers that they’re working to qualify themselves for.  We try to provide both textbook and experiential learning as well as networking opportunities that will put our students in the best position to find whatever jobs they hope to obtain as graduates of the Tulane MFIN program.
Q: How will the new curriculum help MFIN students be more competitive in the job market?
A: We work very closely with the companies that actively recruit Tulane grads, as well as with our alumni. One consistent piece of feedback we were getting was that our MFIN students would benefit from more accounting courses. We listened, and beginning next year students will take two intermediate accounting courses as part of the core curriculum.
 Q: If you could get in a time machine and take one class offered by the MFIN program, which class would it be?
A: I would have to say the Freeman Reports class. It’s a great course in which you essentially experience the every-day life of an equity analyst, and you get access to management at a real oil and gas company here in the Gulf South. I also would love to have taken the Fixed Income Analytics class.
Tommy Milburn
Master of Finance Candidate 2014