@Stern.Nyu.Edu

Even though every post so far has centered around sightseeing I do study once in a while. To describe that experience I'll structure it around the common words contained in the email address you have as a student here - i.e. @Stern.Nyu.Edu.

• Stern

Stern is a business school among the very best. What you meet here is students who work hard for the (not small) amount of money they put into their education. You meet a faculty who features Nobell-Prize winners and successful business people ready to share their experiences with you. And you are, exclusively as a graduate student, so privileged to enjoy nice facilities with meeting rooms and study rooms far exceeding the standards at CBS.

I take the following courses @ Stern:

- Corporate Finance with Aswath Damodaran. This course takes you through the firm's financing decisions; the Investment Principle, the Financing Principle and the Dividend Principle. If you have the slightest interest in the field I encourage you to visit Damodaran's web-site (http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/) which offers an abundance of useful material free of charge - including web casts of his lectures. The guy is among the very best teachers I ever had and I'm so excited about learning more about corporate financial analysis over the next months.

- Entrepreneurial Finance with Roy Smith. A former partner at Goldman Sachs, Smith has a lot of practical experience and offers a course which aims at analyzing the challenges faced by entrepreneurs seeking to raise capital for their firms. But it's not only about finance, the entire business plan of entrepreneurs - a lot of them Stern MBA graduates - is scrutinized. Very interesting course!

- Investment Banking with Ken Froewiss. This course takes you through the instruments I-banks sell and the way they work. Even though I'll not go into banking it's very useful to understand their approach to delivering value to clients, especially since you can easily end up working with them 'on the other side of the table.'

- Advanced Strategy Analysis with Goncalo Pacheco-de-Almeida. A young and very enthusiastic professor offering a course that basically centers around analyzing how to interact in turbulent market environments. Inspired by the best-seller Blue Ocean Strategy, the course seeks to identify the key success factors in developing a successful business model in an ever-changing environment.

- Decision Models with David Juran. A course in programming and using Excel for decision making can by definition not be extremely interesting. However, since the professor is immensely entertaining it has actually turned out to be quite a good experience. And I must admit, being a complete Excel dummy, I already learned a lot. As our beloved professor remarked during the first lecture: "This course has a sub-title: Make Excel your bitch!" So, that's the spirit for the next few months in the course.

• NYU

A good word to describe New York University is community. The university offers sporting facilities free of charge, there are NYU shuttle-busses that can take you around in the Village, a trillion events you can attend (many more than your schedule allows you to do) etc etc.

• Edu

Education takes a different form here than in Denmark. One thing is that in many courses you're graded on participation. This implies higher demands for preparation ahead of lectures, and also more incentive to actually making sure that your professor knows who you are. Another thing which is quite different is the curved grading system. In any class in the finance department at Stern around 20-25% will get an "A", 50-55% a "B" and 15-25% a "C", "D" or "F". What does that mean in practice? It means that the level in the class room means a lot for the effort you need to put in. If you're e.g. in an investment banking class with a bunch of guys who all did an internship in investment banking, forget about getting an "A" - since they know more than you and according to the system there are only so many "A"s to be given.
Another thing that strikes is the practical applicability. I like having a theoretical foundation, but I see it as a major advantage, coming from a theoretical M.Sc. education, to join an MBA program in which all your professor cares about is: Can it be applied - if not, forget about it!

Below you see a picture of the graduate students from CBS at Stern this semester. From the left: Michael (my room mate), Peter, me, Sara, David and Dominik.