MGT-8813 - Financial Modeling
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Reviews
tl;dr - Business track is “low-effort low-commitment”. This is an example of why.
No one bothers to put a review for Fall 2021.
Not sure if this class is worth a rigor of a Master’s degree in Georgia Tech, or a class that I could get out as an Accountancy course from a community college. There is totally no critical thinking needed in this class. Just follow the steps and you get your A. Any deviation would be deemed wrong and you will get a B.
If you like something in which you prefer a huge commanderie, consider the Analytical Tools Track courses like ISYE 6740 Computational Data Analysis.
If you expect more of a stock market/investment focus, then ironically you should consider Computational Track courses like CS 7646 Machine Learning for Trading instead.
It is exactly such courses like this that make this track that disparaging.
As other reviews have stated this is an easy course. The HWs are mostly filling in the blanks in excel sheets, in most cases the formulas are exactly the same as in the demo so you just need to copy and paste.
The project is essentially a bigger version of the HWs and again very easy but can be fiddily just because of the amount manual calcs there are in balance sheets and forecasts
I needed an easy course to pair with a harder course and this satisfied that. It’s an easy A whether you decide to try and learn the material or not, I think there are some useful things in here like learning to read balance sheets and Statement of Cashflows etc. but the easy format of the class means you’ll only retain the info if you really are interested it, which i wasnt
This course is ridiculous. As someone earlier pointed out, it should be called “how to fill in the blanks on a spreadsheet”. However, if you deviate from the videos in your approach to the homework (because God forbid you have some preexisting knowledge or have learned something) you will be gigged by an army of script-wielding trolls who have no knowledge of finance.
If you need a class to pad your GPA, this is a #1 candidate. However, don’t expect to learn much or have to engage your brain in any way.
This course is a great example of “what you get out of this course is what you want to get out of this course”. Basically you can go in without any financial modeling experience and leave without learning anything while scoring an A. 80-90 percent of this course is basically following step by step instructions on how to fill up an excel model. That being said, I think it was a well designed course with a superb teaching team. They are superb. Their response time on piazza is insane and they hold themselves to super high standards. Kudos. I would recommend this course to anyone who is interested in the subject or who just wants to get an easy A.
The assignments were great as I had zero experience with financial modelling and this was a very good introduction to what is involved.
Professor offers comprehensive lectures and is very responsive on Piazza.
The only downside is how easy it was. The content of the assignments was genuinely insightful but I didnt figure anything out myself. It doesn’t foster curiosity or develop problem solving skills.
I don’t mind an easy class, and I surely am not insisting on taking only classes that take 20+ hours/week, so my complaint about this class not that it is “easy” like most reviews imply this is the problem. My problem with this class is that it forces you to watch lectures and follow them blindly on excel, and if you even dare to think and do things slightly differently, even if you end up with the same answer, then you will be penalized. Any class in this program, even DVA or CDA or BDFHC will seem “easy” if you are given a tutorial video and all you have to do is to follow it blindly, and although this makes it easier not only for the students, but also for the instructor and the TAs, still this will usually results in students learning nothing.
The slack channel for this class is dead, and the few posts on Piazza are mostly asking for how to name their files, and there is barely any useful discussion, and I guess it is because everything is spoon-fed to the extent that you loose the desire to learn. Yes, the instructor and the TAs are professional and responsive, but why wouldn’t they when it seems that they are required to do the least effort compared to any other class in the program.
So how to improve this class? Give assignments that require the students to think and learn. It will require more effort from the TAs because students will then be asking questions and the assignments will not be auto-evaluated anymore, but at least then the students will graduate from the class learning something!!!!
I am on the OMSA analytics track and was using this class as a sub for MGT 8803 I opted out of. If you are on the business track, you might enjoy this more than I did!
I went in expected something different. I was expected more of a stock market/investment focus (that’s my fault). (I did enjoy the HW’s on portfolio optimization and options pricing!) When you think financial modeling though, think financial statements (which I don’t enjoy!). At times, felt a lot like an undergrad accounting course.
PROS
• Great professor. She is very sharp, knowledgeable, and passionate about finance and just cool
• Professor is very engaged, which is rare in OMSA program!
• For what the class teaches, I think she does a great job and clearly put in a lot of time. Very thorough.
• Learned some tricks in Excel
• This could be good or bad, but the professor is very thorough
CONS
• Weekly lectures for HW and cases can be quite long. Many times, 2-4 hours. (But, when I think about it, a 3-credit on-campus course has ~3-hours of lectures per week, so I suppose this is inline.)
• The cases were VERY painful for me. Not hard, but VERY tedious, take a long time (videos), and not topics I enjoyed (mainly, creating different financial statements).
• A lot of following the leader (i.e., you mimic what the teacher does). This might work well for some people.
This class is very easy to get an A. The homeworks and cases closely mirror the examples in the lecture videos. Overall, you get out of this class what you put in. If you’re looking to pair this with another hard class, it’s easy to get by with little time commitment although you won’t learn much. On the contrary, if you take the time to understand the lecture concepts, go to office hours, and engage on piazza then you can learn a lot. Professor Garner is very kind and responsive. Her lectures are clear, and she’s good at explaining things in a simple manner.
I came into the course highly knowledgeable in Microsoft Excel. Generally, I find Excel to be overly utilized. This course reinforces ways to use Excel when better tools exist. For example, I can now do matrix multiplication in Excel when these operations should be in a tool like R.
That said, Excel is still heavily used in many companies globally. The assignments were incredibly easy video examples walked thru every step cell by cell. You just have to copy and paste into the actual homework or project assignments. Also, many of examples provided were very manual compared to more efficient methods. For example, depreciation values were looked up using a nested IF statement with cell by cell reference rather than a simple vlookup. Because of the macro grading, using a more advanced formula was discouraged. Marcro grading also required following steps exactly even if you could achieve the right end result.
The professor is very knowledgeable and helpful. Her office hours were fun but not really necessary to attend.
In summary, the course is very easy but tedious (long videos) but I did enjoy the professor.
This class is extremely easy, but the material still reinforces concepts taught in the intro business class. You can do the homeworks and cases while you watch the videos.
As some of the previous posters mentioned, the lecture videos are a little tedious and don’t require any thinking, just copy the formulas into your own Excel sheet. I would have liked a little more depth to the actual financial modeling part and less of the videos spent on Excel tutorials and walking through the formulas.
For the cases, she does provide numbers-only solutions so that you can verify that your formulas produce the right answers.
The entire course is following the teacher’s long, dull videos where she walks through financial statements and models in Excel. All you do is copy the formulas. There is very little depth, discussion, or thought when you complete the homework. The only positive is that it helps you learn more about accounting statements.
I marked this class as ‘easy’ in the difficulty ranking, but in reality I would call it - low stress. It will probably take 5 hours per week in a regular (Fall/Spring) semester. Some weeks took more, and a few weeks took less. Most of the time I spent watching the lecture videos and following along with a spreadsheet. At first I thought that might be boring, but I did learn a few things with optimization and VBA. Also learned some techniques to use Excel to perform some matrix math. I found many times, I could watch the videos at 1.5x speed. But then sometimes I’d go back and rewatch sections.
I think I understand the financial formulas better after taking Financial Modeling, than when I took the Business Fundamentals course - where they give a bunch of terms and formulas to memorize. In addition to financial formulas, I have a better understanding of some of the math concepts behind them. Maybe it’s just me, but how Covariance works and what it can be used for makes more sense after this course.
Dr. Garner was active in Piazza and on every Office Hour that I attended (I attended most of them). The TA’s were responsive as well. Office hours were not a required attendance, but I attended many because I enjoyed them.
I’m not sure if this is true of the other Business electives, but this class had less than 100 students, so the forums and office hours felt more personal. Another plus to FM - there are no exams. There are 4 or 5 individual homework assignments and 4 group case studies (analyzing a company using different methods).
I liked the way groups are done in this class. We were allowed to reach out to form our own groups during the first week or so, then anybody who couldn’t find groups were assigned. She encourages us to come to agreement as a group to find a workload balance. She has a nice spreadsheet which each group member submits to help keep grading proportional to each member’s effort.
If you are looking for a Business Track elective, then I would recommend Financial Modeling. You may even think about taking this before the Business Fundamentals course, as some of the concepts are explained in easier to understand format - at least for me.
I liked this class overall. It’s a bit of a GPA pad like most of the MGT courses in OMSA, but there’s still good information to learn from the class.
I’d recommend it for someone in the Business track who wants to learn more about Financial models and Excel. If you’re looking for hard-core “analytics modeling”, this isn’t the class for you.
The good:
- Upping your Excel skills in a significant way even if you’re well versed in Excel
- Learning to analyze company financial statements
- Understanding different methods of company valuation
What’s to improve:
- The content is a bit spoon fed. The professor basically shows you 100% of what to do to make the calculations. I think she could have left more for you to discover and figure out on your own.
- Some of the lectures are quite long and tedious (see above)
- The class is good at teaching you the mechanics of the various Excel models, but doesn’t focus as much on the WHY.
This isn’t the “financial modeling” class I thought it’d be with analyzing investments, forecasting economic trends, etc. In fact there’s practically no modeling at all. It’s more like MGT 8803’s finance portion, except an entire semester’s worth. Reviewing various financial statements and doing very simple math.
The only software we use is Excel. I learned a few new tricks there (like did you know you can do Matrix multiplication?? I didn’t!) but generally didn’t gain the type of knowledge I wouldn’t have wanted. Not to say it had no use at all - I learned how to build a loan amortization table and figure out what would happen to my mortgage under various scenarios, as well as the aforementioned Excel skills.
There are a few individual homeworks, most of which can be completed by watching the lectures and copying what the instructor puts in the cell, letter-by-letter. There are also four group projects, which are like the homeworks but more involved. They’re still fairly simple, you could probably do all four by yourself, but they’re group projects. You also grade your group-mates’ effort to ensure nobody slacks off. Lectures are pretty long but easy to follow, unlike other courses you won’t need to watch them twice or look to outside resources.
Overall quite easy, both in terms of difficulty and time involved. Also, the instructor Jacqueline is very kind and accommodating - if you want to pad your GPA without much effort or really want to learn more about balance sheets and statements of cash flows take this course. But if you want to do some in-depth analysis of different types of investments, learn how to predict how stock portfolios will behave, etc. you’ll be disappointed by this.
This was an interesting class, almost completely based on excel, and primarily covering the three statement model as well as some capital budgeting and structure stuff.
I have almost no experience in finance, but DO have extensive excel experience, so I found this class to be pretty easy. And even if you are an excel beginner, the professor more or less walks you through just about everything anyway.
Speaking of the professor. I liked her.
The videos can run a little longer than what I’ve seen so far in other courses. And, you will have a team project (I hate team projects). Our team basically just all the the whole project and then compared notes. Then one of us would submit.
Most interesting subject to me was the portfolio stuff where you try to optimize a portfolio to minimize risk free return using matrix algebra. I have never studied MPT or any of that, but I suspect this touched on the very basics of it. More of that, would be what I’d want to see.
Good course, of the three business analytics track electives, this would probably be the most “work” but even still it’s light compared to the omsa courses, let alone the cse ones.