LECTURER: Good afternoon everyone.
My name is Joey Yang,
from UWA Business School.
I'm here to give you a summary
on the finance major we offer here.
First of all,
here is what I'm gonna cover today.
What is Finance?
Why do we study Finance?
What practical experience
are we likely to get from studying Finance?
Is there any overseas study opportunities?
And what the job prospects are?
And to be able to study finance,
you need to have some background in accounting.
So the prerequisite for finance is the accounting.
And finance is the study of investments, money,
and corporations in order to increase value.
For the firm, for a fund, or for yourself.
And one fun fact of finance
is that financial investments can be risky
and some of them could be actually not
too different from gambling.
Why should we study Finance?
It helps you understand how financial system works
and what the role,
what role it plays in the economy.
When you see stock market index going up and down.
What does it say about the status of the economy.
And it helps you understand the time value of money
and the relationship between risk
and return in financial markets.
Studying finance also helps you obtain tools
to make wealth maximising decisions.
For example,
from a company's perspective,
it helps you finding the best assets to invest in,
so that it increases or maximises value for the company,
which bring up the share price.
From fund management perspective,
it helps you find the best portfolio
with optimal combination of different financial assets
for example, stocks, bonds, futures, contracts, etc.
Then let's have a look at practical experience.
When you study finance,
you will be given business case studies to analyse,
which comes from real world companies,
for example, BHB, National Bank,
and we will have simulated trading game
for you to understand how stock market works,
and to use the trading game
to implement to your trading strategies.
And every year, we have corporate sponsored challenges
open to students,
and those challenges are mainly on
simulated company's investment decisions,
and what they do to the firm's performance.
Those decisions include things like mergers acquisitions,
financing, issuing new equities etc.
And we will have students
visiting temporarily another campus
in the US and UK on our exchange programmes.
For example, you could go to Harvard Business School
and spend a semester there or London School of Economics.
There will be also internship opportunities overseas
for those that are interested.
Lastly, in terms of career,
we could get a job as a financial analyst
for a brokerage firm,
Chief Financial Officer or CFO for a corporation
or investment banker, for investment bank.
There are other job opportunities for finance graduates,
such as in normal retail banks,
or in insurance industry, etc.
Thank you very much.
And if you have any questions,
you can email me or approach staff at student centre.
Bye.