News

Acquire Wall Street Financial Skills

2 March, 2015

Have you ever wondered what is it like to work on Wall Street and what sorts of skills you need to work there? At CERGE-EI, students of our MA in Applied Economics now have a chance to acquire these skills and prepare for a successful career in finance at an international level.

This spring, we are offering a new elective course: Applied Investment Analysis (AIA), created and taught by Jiří Trešl Ph.D., newly-appointed Program Director of our MA in Applied Economics program and founder of Professional Knowledge Applied (pkA), an online educational venture that co-operates with leading global educational institutions and offers cutting-edge learning programs.

AIA is an intensive applied finance class based on real-world Wall Street finance training programs which are designed to equip the candidates with the applied modeling skills necessary to become global finance professionals. The training programs cover highly-sought after skills for careers in consulting, corporate finance, private equity, equity research and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions.

In AIA, students gain hands-on experience and technical knowledge to develop “Wall Street” financial skills. Using a combination of videos, reference manuals and excel model templates, the blended-learning course teaches students how to build, analyze, and interpret financial models in a step-by-step fashion on their own, at their own pace. Instead of reading a textbook at home, students work through the online training. The online lectures blend pedagogical best practices into the platform which enables students to learn intuitively and efficiently. In the classroom, Jiří Trešl reinforces the applied knowledge.

An exciting part of the curriculum is trading stocks live. Another attractive AIA feature is that students who pass the final exam receive a certificate from pkA and the Wall Street training firm.

Jindřich Gallo, a current student in the AIA course. “Coming with a finance background from my former university as well as my international and professional experience, I have completed many finance-oriented courses in my life. But it was only at the AIA class that I encountered the best practice and the logic of Wall Street. I have felt real enthusiasm and passion for Jiří’s course in the classroom from day one. Jiří not only teaches us how the financial markets work, but he really enables us to look into the mechanisms and the logic that drives the daily operations of markets so we not only learn how to develop and use the tools, but more importantly how to think about them and how to understand the outcomes. I can confidently say that this is the best finance course I have ever taken.”