New Classes for Winter Quarter
Hello everyone, long time no see! Actually this was quite possibly the shortest winter break I can remember of my academic career, but it still feels like it’s been awhile since I “blogged.” We are already into our second week of the winter quarter, and it looks like it will be a great quarter of challenging, yet very worthwhile courses. This quarter I have four classes, and I figured I’d give a brief explanation of those courses since a lot of potential students read this blog and might find it interesting to hear what options they may have in the future…
My first class of the week is a required course for all MAcc students: AMIS 803 – Foundations of Accounting with Professor Arya. After one week, this class seems to have a strong focus on managerial or “cost” accounting, but with an interesting spin. The professor likes to take the typical accounting that we have always learned throughout our education and mix it up by throwing in different variables and assumptions that maybe you never thought of before. There also seems to be a good mix of economic theory mixed into this class, so I’m really looking forward to the rest of this course.
My next class is Finance 822 – Security Markets and Investments with Professor Bao. The course title is somewhat self-explanatory, but so far in this class we have talked about interesting finance-focused topics such as the efficiency of stock markets and the varying hypotheses that go behind that. As an MBA class that does not focus on accounting, this course will be a great way to get a break from my accounting coursework while also improving my overall finance knowledge.
The third of my courses is another accounting course called AMIS 861 – Fraud Examination with Professor Turner. I am looking forward to all of my courses, but this one especially since I will be going into the field of auditing – a profession where fraud is extremely important. Not to mention it is just an interesting topic to learn about. For example, today we watched the video “How to Steal $500 Million” and in our last class we had a nationally recognized speaker on the topic of fraud that has given similar presentations to the likes of the FBI, Office of the Attorney General, the SEC Institute, and the AICPA.
My fourth and final course is FIN 849 – Financial Spreadsheet Modeling in Excel with Professor Oglevee. In this course we will learn how to create around 55 types of financial models using excel, while learning various useful techniques of how to use excel along the way. I know some people are not the biggest fans of Excel, but after taking this class, you’ll quickly realize that it is a powerful tool and most people have no idea of the things you can do with it.
So that’s my course load for the quarter. It’ll definitely be a busy quarter, but in a good way, and I so am really looking forward to the next 9 weeks.
Tyler