‘Maximizing the NPV’ by this sentence we can recognize a great personality who made a new approach in teaching the core finance subject “The Advanced corporate Finance”. He is none other than our dear Professor Raghavendra Rau from University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD and an MSc from INSEAD, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and a BSc from the University of Delhi. Before joining the University of Cambridge, Prof Rau taught at a number of universities around the world, including the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences PO), Purdue University, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley. Most recently he taught at MYRA School of Business. He has also won the Dean’s Outstanding MBA core course teaching award 2005and 2007 and the 2001 School of Management Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award at Purdue University. In 2008-2009, Professor Rau was Principal at Barclays Global Investors, then the largest asset manager in the world, in San Francisco. His research interests lie in the area of corporate finance and market efficiency.
This was the best learning experience I ever had in MYRA. The course was for one week and I was excited and looked forward to the first class, as I am interested in finance. I was eager to see how all the concepts will be taught as we have already done our corporate finance course and those concepts are to be implemented in the advanced corporate finance, and believe me, by the end of the course, I realized that the easiest subject is finance when we do it practically. The subject started with a basic introduction to what is finance and then it continued to finding the NPV that is the Net Present Value, and then we were taught how to value a company, to value a project, to unlever beta, about capital structure and at last the corporate valuation these are carried out in class with ten case studies which include different types of companies facing problems in making decisions and how much value they should consider for their processing with decisions.
By the end of the course my perspective towards finance, mainly corporate finance, had totally changed. This is a precious tool which is essential in making decisions in the corporate world, were one day we become managers and have to make decisions in issuing the projects that makes profit to the companies. And also not only think in the way of a manager we should also think like a stakeholder in making decisions on a project. This course gave us an insight to the corporate world as to what exactly happens in a company when making a decision. According to me, there is no professor who would make a student feel that finance subject is a very easy and conceptual subject that should be opted to make your career. I could only conclude by saying that I thank MYRA for putting in the effort to get an amazing and experienced professor to teach us this subject, and equip us as future managers, with the knowledge of Advanced Corporate Finance.
Sri Gowthami
PGDM 1st year
MYRA School of Business