Anyone Here Ever Study Finance?

[Yavin4]

I've taken a few finance courses in the past, and now, I am brushing up my skills after being in IT for a while. Why is it that there are so many jerks that teach finance? I've taken development classes in programming and database management, and in these classes, the profs are really good at explaining and helping you. Even when they're not, there are tons of books and online materials that will assist you.

In finance, the profs seem to go out of their way to NOT teach you. They never want to explain anything. They never prepare notes and make you follow them on the board. The books explain fairly simple concepts in the most arcane language and detail. They almost seem to want to discourage you from learning.

[cbdo2007]

1. Have you read the GD forum yet? It's obvious 99.99999% of DUers know nothing about Finance.

[ncliberal]

2. I have a Finance degree.

In my experience the finance professors were all republicans and many were jerks as were a few of the management professors I had. I experienced the same thing as you. They often did not explain things and were not helpful. My favorite was the one that gave us 2+ hour exams that had to be completed in 1 hour. :sarcasm: None of us ever finished those exams. The accounting professors were/are much better. I also have experience in IT and those professors were great also.

[flvegan]

3. I was a finance major.

I wish I had an answer for you, but I had much of the same experience.

[question everything]

4. I was lucky. Had a very good finance teacher who was a nice person, too

but this was more than 20 years ago so things probably changed.

[Capn Sunshine]

5. My prof was a former head of OMB

And we spent a LOT of time on traditional, Wall St. style finance, and his favorite course, which was specific to the US Govvie budgetary process.

But until you've had a window seat as your banking vehicle crashes and burns along with hundreds of others, you'll never learn the negative assumptions they skip right by in academia.

[Yavin4]

6. Every Big Financial Theory Is Based on a Normal Distribution of Outcomes

For example, historically, mortgage payments probably followed a normal distribution, and as such, you could rate them accordingly. Life never follows normal distributions. Life is far more fat tail.

[NewJeffCT]

7. I had some good finance professors

way back in the dark ages of the 80s... though, some of my fellow accounting majors got upset with one finance prof who would mock accounting majors. It didn't bother me, but it did some people.

[Patiod]

8. Finance major here, and I actually enjoyed it

Maybe the profs who ended up at Penn State were a different breed, but I really enjoyed my finance classes. It was my Comp Sci (yeah, I'm that old) teachers who I found obtuse.