It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and actually talked about what’s been going on in my Master of Finance program. I gave a brief overview in my A Life in the Day post which featured my “Follow me Around” vlog but didn’t really go in depth about my classes and projects, etc so, in case you were wondering, here you go.

S.T.A.T.A. (Some Things Are Totally Applicable)

Basically, each class this semester has had a group project at it’s culmination and STATA was it for our Financial Information and Decision Making course. We were tasked with replicating a regression analysis from an older major accounting paper using the data analysis software, STATA. I really liked the assignment because it got us all used to a new program that we can use for writing our theses.

I also liked the project because learning to use STATA was pretty fun to me. I think I am definitely an outlier with that opinion (as with many) but it brought me back to my coding days. When I was maybe 10 years old, I played a game called Horseland. Nowadays the game is different but back then it had a heavy focus on coding your profile page. Not to toot my own horn, but I was pretty good, even selling my designs for Horseland currency.

With this background, I caught onto the coding language pretty quickly and when we actually began writing our codes, it was pretty fun to troubleshoot. Now that we finished our project, it will be very interesting to find out how we did. I think maybe we got the wrong numbers but we came up with a good analysis for our results so who knows how our grade will turn out. In the end, the project was a little frustrating at times but overall very fun and useful.

Death in the form of a Group Project

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the group project that we have for our Corporate Valuation class is literally hell. It’s due in two weeks so I will reserve some judgement until then but for now it is absolutely killer. Basically, we could put hundreds and hundreds of hours into this project but at the end of the day it’s only worth 30 points (out of 120 points for our total grade) so it’s a huge challenge figuring out how much to do and where to cut corners.

The only good thing about that project is that the group sizes are fairly big so we can split the workload a bit. My group members are also super competent so I’m really lucky to have gotten assigned to a group that has a clue about what they’re doing.

Consultants in Training

The final project that is going on as of late is our Advisory Project. Basically, during this week, we get assigned a company and we consult them on a project they give us. It’s pretty intense since, at the end, we will be presenting our suggestions and findings to actual managers and CFO’s of the firm. I plan on giving a big summary about this project at the end of the week when we finish the project so stay tuned for that update. I’m sure it will be very interesting.

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So, for now, that is everything. The Advisory Project will end at the end of this week, and the rest of the classes have finals not the next week, but two weeks after and then I am that much closer to finishing my time here at FS. After finals will be our Responsibility in Finance course as well as my elective, Behavioral Finance which I’m really looking forward to. Before that, like I said, follow to find out if we end up embarrassing ourselves in front of some big CFO next week.