While most students traveled home for fall break, 40 students interested in finance careers stayed on campus for a Wall Street preparation workshop organized by the Career Center. The program provided a detailed, albeit rigorous, introduction to financial statements modeling and valuation.
The workshop was taught by Peter Bowley, a Wall Street Prep instructor who worked as an investment banker in Credit Suisse’s Latin America division in Argentina. With an MBA from Columbia Business School, he is now working part time on his own start-up and part time for Wall Street Prep as an instructor. Bowley began by emphasizing the benefit of the course as a vehicle to opening doors in the finance world.
Participants in the two-day, 14-hour workshop were required to study the introductory sections of accounting and MS Excel beforehand. On the first day, the instructor gave a detailed explanation of all four financial statements: balance sheet, income statement, statement of stockholders’ equity and statement of cash flow. Later, participants worked on rudimentary financial statement modeling and learned the ins and outs of recording different transactions.
Examples and exercises included statements from current top tier companies to make the workshop as real as possible. Participants were given a homework exercise that they reviewed with Bowley thoroughly the next day. The second day was just as informative and punctilious as the first with the focus on different ratios and ways to calculate future predications.
Students commented that the workshop was highly beneficial. Besides all they learned over two days, participants received a free 12-month access to Wall Street Prep online crash courses. “I think the program helped me adapt common technical skills that I can apply to my future career. Between financial modeling and valuations, I think I learned a lot… even the [accounting] terminologies, that we learned, are a crucial part of banking,” commented Anna Liu ’18.
The program was made possible by the generosity of Hamilton alumnus Howard Morgan ’84 and the Alexander Hamilton Institute.
