First day of classes in term 4 and I had my plate full with a double session of Applied Financial Engineering in the morning, followed by a session of Applied Corporate Finance and then a session on Internet as a Sales Channel.
What can I say - day started with a very engaging class of financial engineering, where we got to do a lot of things hands-on from finding NPVs to designing the Loan amortization - all using excel. But before getting our hands dirty, Antonio Rivela, our professor for the class spent some time explaining how the theoretical concepts of corporate finance, and procedures involving finding waccs and betas don't work very well in the real world. And then, he gave his own version of what this course will prepare us for, and its usefulness in finance world, based on his previous work experience with investment banks.
It is time to break away from the usual moulds of formula and learn new things - his argument for the case, if we know how things work for one interval of time and we have tools like excel and matlab to take care of the repetitions and complex calculations, why settle for a lesser accurate answer obtained by using some formula derived by making so many assumptions - instead why not just spent an equal amount of time writing a command or using an excel function and get the best answer :-)
Point well taken Antonio :-)
Besides the facts that I have all my past experience working for investment banking IT, with my Masters project coding done in Matlab, and with Math as one of my favorite subjects since primary school days, the sheer energy that Antonio brought to the classroom, the small population of people taking this class, and this posibility of venturing into unbeaten paths has now raised my expectations from this course. So far, its been great.
Next was the applied corporate finance class by Prof Conchita. As she has been the corporate finance professor in the past term for A1 section, with many people from A1, she was already familiar. Not to mention, while discussing many concepts, I heard for the first and may be the only time in my MBA, what I have heard only in my graduation days - where a professor walks in and says, we discussed these things in previous term, its now time to move on to more advanced things this term.
What is good about this is that there will be efficiency in the teaching as she already knows what we know and there won't be unnecessary deviations in this class. Looking forward to learning some advanced and applied concepts of corporate finance from this class :-)
And the last class - of Internet as Sales Channel by Professor Fernando - was yet another interesting class. By the time this class started I was already sapped out due to heavy schedule for the day, but Fernando with his discussion and examples from current happenings kept the class interesting and I was happy that I have taken this class. What started with discussing how a correct strategy is vital to success of an ecommerce business went on to discussing some real life examples, and how some of the big firms are impacting our daily lives. And yes, the term of the day that Fernando gave, and which I would remember the most - "Facebook is the best CRM system out there today and whats great about this system is that we as customers volunteerily provide all our details into this system".
That's an interesting angle isn't it?
Looks like the electives period is going to be a great one and I can't wait to learn all that it has to offer :-)
What can I say - day started with a very engaging class of financial engineering, where we got to do a lot of things hands-on from finding NPVs to designing the Loan amortization - all using excel. But before getting our hands dirty, Antonio Rivela, our professor for the class spent some time explaining how the theoretical concepts of corporate finance, and procedures involving finding waccs and betas don't work very well in the real world. And then, he gave his own version of what this course will prepare us for, and its usefulness in finance world, based on his previous work experience with investment banks.
It is time to break away from the usual moulds of formula and learn new things - his argument for the case, if we know how things work for one interval of time and we have tools like excel and matlab to take care of the repetitions and complex calculations, why settle for a lesser accurate answer obtained by using some formula derived by making so many assumptions - instead why not just spent an equal amount of time writing a command or using an excel function and get the best answer :-)
Point well taken Antonio :-)
Besides the facts that I have all my past experience working for investment banking IT, with my Masters project coding done in Matlab, and with Math as one of my favorite subjects since primary school days, the sheer energy that Antonio brought to the classroom, the small population of people taking this class, and this posibility of venturing into unbeaten paths has now raised my expectations from this course. So far, its been great.
Next was the applied corporate finance class by Prof Conchita. As she has been the corporate finance professor in the past term for A1 section, with many people from A1, she was already familiar. Not to mention, while discussing many concepts, I heard for the first and may be the only time in my MBA, what I have heard only in my graduation days - where a professor walks in and says, we discussed these things in previous term, its now time to move on to more advanced things this term.
What is good about this is that there will be efficiency in the teaching as she already knows what we know and there won't be unnecessary deviations in this class. Looking forward to learning some advanced and applied concepts of corporate finance from this class :-)
And the last class - of Internet as Sales Channel by Professor Fernando - was yet another interesting class. By the time this class started I was already sapped out due to heavy schedule for the day, but Fernando with his discussion and examples from current happenings kept the class interesting and I was happy that I have taken this class. What started with discussing how a correct strategy is vital to success of an ecommerce business went on to discussing some real life examples, and how some of the big firms are impacting our daily lives. And yes, the term of the day that Fernando gave, and which I would remember the most - "Facebook is the best CRM system out there today and whats great about this system is that we as customers volunteerily provide all our details into this system".
That's an interesting angle isn't it?
Looks like the electives period is going to be a great one and I can't wait to learn all that it has to offer :-)
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