The Start of Fall Session 2

Now that we are officially finished with the core first-session classes, us SMF students have the chance to begin taking elective courses. This is the first time that we can begin to specialize in one of the four tracks: Corporate Finance, Investment Management, Risk Management, or Real Estate. I am working on the Investment Management track which influences my Core Capstone Project.

The Core Capstone Project (for the Investment Management track) is a session-long program over 7 weeks where you and four others pick a company in the S&P 500 to create a ten-page analyst report with a Buy, Sell, or Hold rating. This project gives us tremendous experience that we can leverage in future job interviews as well as learn invaluable skills in project management. We also get to leverage the software application skills we learned on CapitalIQ and Bloomberg to help us go through this project. It is a highly independent project that relies on our abilities to work diligently without having designated times to do so. 

In addition to the project, we also are required to take Derivatives I with Professor Kewei Hou. In that class, we are learning all about options, futures, and forwards and how they can be used for risk hedging or speculation. The electives that I am taking this session are related to the track that I want to go down. I am taking Data for Financial Management II with Professor Taner Pirim. In that class, we are expanding on what we learned in the first session and how statistics can be applied to financial problems. The last elective that I am taking is Financial Modeling with Professor Daniel Oglevee. In his class, we are learning all about Microsoft Excel and how to create professional models that can be sent to bosses or clients.

It is exciting to be able to start to specialize in this program and the first session has flown by. Before we know it, the spring semester will be starting and the job search will be in full swing (although we will be starting that process this session).