It was never my plan, in fact, becoming a finance professor wasn’t even a thought until I started applying to grad school. However, even though it wasn’t planned, I had been preparing for this role for a long time.
Looking back it only makes sense that I would have ended up a finance professor. This job seems like it was tailor-made for me.
How it started: My first investment
When I first started getting interested in finance, I was in middle school. My dad would let me help him pick the mutual funds for my college fund, and we would go over past returns and asset allocation. It was awesome, and I loved receiving the quarterly statements in the mail.
My first personal investment was in a certificate of deposit. Low risk, but CD’s were paying around 6% at this time, so the returns weren’t so bad. I saved up my first $1,000 and purchased a one year CD. This was the hook.
My first statement I realized the power of having my money work for me. I wasn’t doing anything, but I was earning what I know now is passive income. The next year I purchased another CD and rolled over my first. Compound interest was real. I pulled out a notebook and ran yearly estimates of rolling over the interest.
I wouldn’t know until four years later that I was doing compound interest by hand.
From Hobby to Career: Continuing to Learn
Through high school, I read everything I could about the markets but didn’t realize there was an actual finance degree. I was focused on getting a job that started with high pay so that I could invest more sooner.
I had complete control over my investment account and invested in stocks and funds that I thought best; it wasn’t until grad school that I started reading the papers discussing the importance of indexing and the flaws of active management. I was able to experience the ups and downs of the market first hand. I even had the grand experience of being long in leveraged ETFs on the day of the flash crash.
When I sat in my first finance course in college, I learned the power of the financial calculator. My mind was blown. A calculator that could do in a couple of keystrokes what used to take pages of calculations.
From that point on I knew that instead of being someone interested in finance, I wanted to surround myself with everything finance. I went on to grad school, earned my Ph.D. in finance, and now am on the opposite side of the classroom.
To the Front of the Classroom: Spreading the Knowledge
I think back to the first times I heard about cool things in finance.Topics like:
- The magic of compound interest
- Doubling your money every day for a month starting with a penny ends with over $10 million.
- The inner workings of how a trading floor works to match buyers and sellers.
- The fact that a buyer pays so much interest over the life of a mortgage, especially at the beginning.
- How fast high-frequency trading firms trade.
- Tradable market volatility
These are all awesome bits of knowledge, most of which are accompanied by stories or a gateway to new realms of finance. I wanted to be the person to share these stories and pass on this knowledge to others.
They are important lessons and information needed to make major life decisions. So important, that the information needed to be presented as best as it could be. Students wouldn’t get the excitement of this information through me reading the slides of a boring powerpoint. I would need to show why what I was teaching was important and how it will affect everyone at some point in their life.
Now, I have that opportunity
I am entrusted every semester with instilling financial knowledge in the minds of ~100 business students, some who want to be there others who dread taking anything with a math component.
I get to see the “ah-ha” moments as students understand seemingly difficult concepts or the lightbulbs go off when they realize how this can be applied to their life. This is especially true when we discuss how compound interest can make becoming a millionaire easy with early and consistent investment.
I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Thankfully my teaching evaluations match my enthusiasm, and the students seem to enjoy listening to me babble on about the markets, corporate decision making, and how the financial calculator could and should play a major role in their decision making.
Expanding the Classroom
I never stop learning about new aspects of finance. I am forever a student, and my lectures evolve year after year with new trends and research. This site has been an interesting medium for me to continue my lectures outside the classroom. I am fully in support of open educational resources (free textbooks, etc. for the non-academics), so I’ll build on this trend of providing quality, free, easy to access information.
I hope that one day this site will provide the same enthusiasm for finance to hundreds of new “students” every day and lucky for you reading this page, I won’t assign you homework.
photo credit: money and finance cc license