Eight hours of Finance

Re-start your heart, dear reader, and then think about it again... eight hours of Finance. This is what it must be like to work in a bank. Oh wait, I DID work in a bank, for four years. It was nothing like that.

Yesterday we had eight hours of Finance with a professor named Arturo Bris. Arturo actually stood around the front of an auditorium and succeeded in making financial valuation interesting, for almost eight hours in a row. He is quite an amazing teacher actually, very funny in a completely unexpected way, and I think if this course had a different teacher it might be a whole lot less valuable. Hmm, actually, it does have a different teacher too. His name is Jim Ellert, and he sat at the back of the class for eight hours of Finance. I'm not sure why he chose to spend his Saturday in the back of the auditorium listening to his colleague and co-lecturer teach when it wasn't his time to speak... the chair he slept on for part of the time didn't seem that comfortable, but I'm sure he had his reasons.

Laura told me that in the official IMD blog they link professors' names to their bios, and I thought that was a cool idea, so I'm doing it as well. I'm also attaching here a cool picture of the Chateau D'Ouchy that I took the other night. It looked really menacing at the time, with the moon poking through the clouds just so, and tower rising up into the darkening sky. But, all I had was my cell phone camera, which clearly sucks. Then, an SUV decided to park where I was standing, and literally ran me off the sidewalk. How rude. So, this is the best photo I got, highly messed up in Photoshop. I think it looks more like a pen-and-ink drawing that anything else at this point, but I quite like it.

I'm supposed to be working on various readings, papers etc right now, and this is a fun procrastination tool, but I'm going to go be a good boy shortly. If you're curious, one of the students here, Paul Holmes, put together a short montage of the first few weeks at IMD, and posted it to Youtube here. I don't love his choice of music, but it paints a fairly realistic picture of life at IMD, and I think it's well done.

A bientot.

ps not the correct Paul Holmes.