First Impressions Of Class

Sunday morning. I should have woken up a little earlier but I was out yesterday night. It was a good night out in the East Village, in particular at a place where we manage to enter and soon realized that a kind of private party was going since the drinks were free. Awesome.

Anyway, it’s been the first week of classes and my impressions are pretty good. I have already had at least a session (one hour and twenty minutes at Stern) for each of my courses. I’m gonna have to work quite a lot – more than expected, I guess – but it seems like I may also learn a lot if I do things properly.

It seems like Foundations of Finance is gonna be the toughest course, alongside with Accounting. Both are pretty technical and will require to work on a day-by-day basis, otherwise it’ll be impossible to catch up thereafter. Professors Silber and Gode, respectively, seem to be pretty good and I hope this will help.

Strategy, with Professor Nayyar may be good fun. I’d never been through any case study before and the first one about Ducati’s turnaround program was pretty good. Terms like matrix, Porter or competitive advantage are already common. The thing about this course is that it demands extensive reading every week.

Concerning my other two courses, Firms & Markets (i.e. Microeconomics) and Statistics, I don’t think that they’re gonna be too hard. The professors seem to be very nice and helpful guys. By doing the respective weekly assignments I should be ok.

However, what it’s been more shocking to me is class participation. Everybody is eager to participate and speak in class. Probably due to the fact that almost nobody at all speaks in class in my country's college, this is kind of weird to me. Professors here encourage participation and such participation counts toward your final grade, to a larger or shorter extent, as the case may be. Professor Silber has already told us that “everybody will have to speak at least once through the fall break”. So, I'd better say goodbye to any fears and improve my English speaking skills quickly...

Well, let’s see how the second week develops. During the course of this week we’ll have kick-off meetings for some of the professional (a key resource here at Stern in terms of job search) and leisure clubs. Now I’m gonna come back to the Foundations of Finance reading concerning discounted cash flows valuation….

Ciao