Moore Impact: The Darla Moore School of Business Podcast

Studying Finance at the Moore School

Episode Summary

The finance major is the largest at the Darla Moore School making up one-third of the 1500 students in any given cohort. In this episode, Dr. Powers talks about the wide range of opportunity in undergraduate studies including the Finance Scholars program, what’s exciting about studying finance, and what’s on the horizon for the 2024-25 school year.

Episode Notes

Episode 8: Studying Finance at the Moore School

Host

Kasie Whitener, Clinical Assistant Professor

Guest

Dr. Eric Powers, Associate Professor, Finance Department Chair

Dr. Powers’s research focuses on fixed-income policies of corporations as well as corporate capital investment policy and corporate restructuring and has appeared in leading peer-reviewed academic journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Journal of Corporate Finance. 

The finance major is the largest at the Darla Moore School making up one-third of the 1500 students in any given cohort. In this episode, Dr. Powers talks about the wide range of opportunity in undergraduate studies including the Finance Scholars program, what’s exciting about studying finance, and what’s on the horizon for the 2024-25 school year. Finance graduates go on to work in a variety of fields including investment banking, commercial banking, corporate finance, investment management, and consulting.

Conversation topics:

• The attraction of finance: very fast moving, very large scale (1:31)
• Start out as an analyst - mergers and acquisitions, buy-side (buy companies) or sell-side (get bought) - a whole lot of valuation involved (3:41)
• Looking at the financial statements, making forecasts, figure out what they’re going to generate in terms of cash flows, trying to come up with the story the company is telling (3:58)
• Four year business program - freshmen come in and take accounting, statistics, and economics, all as prerequisites as gateways into the major but sophomore year, then they’ll take their core class (6:15)
• Finance Scholars is the specialty honors program in the finance department (9:21)
• 100 applications, 32 selected this past year
• Includes a set of classes - first pair FIN 365 and two other classes - case study based class, teams of two, focus on some aspect of valuation
• 1 credit hour practicums - alumni bring a company they’ve done the valuation process for, provide financials and tell the story, and the students develop a pitch deck motivating why it’s an attractive company for sale, class culminates in a presentation in front of investment bankers (14:01)
• Faculty mix: a good group focused on financial institution research, Allen Berger among the most cited researchers; some others focus on family banking and family financial decisions, home finance focus; skill set in risk management and insurance; corporate finance (24:00)
• Eric’s research - the impact of some regulations out of the financial crisis - Dodd-Frank legislation (25:51)
• Researchers are keeping their skillsets current by reading the research to make them more effective in the classroom, how AI helps that (34:04)
• Upcoming experimental classes (34:44) - 1) private capital markets, 2) foundations of institutional investing - being taught by members of the SC Retirement System, they manage $25B in assets and will be talking about that; 3) real estate law; 4) 1-credit course on personal investing for the graduating senior - investment advisors from Columbia to offer that class in the fall; the idea came from Elizabeth Babb’s honors thesis
• Further out (37:20) - a course on AI and its application in finance; right now AI can do a pretty good pro forma already, so how do we harness that? Also, quantum computing a collaborative effort with math, physics, and engineering, $15M from state budget to fund SC Quantum (Joe Queenan) - living within the Boyd Foundation

To learn more about studying finance at the Moore School visit this link.

To learn more about the Finance Scholars honors program visit this link.

To learn more about the Moore School in general visit this link.