John Purnode

Experience Prior To The Program

I was an Economics major at my University, so was familiar with some financial terms. I joined the program to ultimately build financial modeling skills and to get a better understanding of what Investment Banking would be like, because at the time of enrolling, I was very interested in a career switch into Investment Banking and this program was recommended to me by Rory Meyers.

Training Experience

What I found most valuable about the training was the fact that the trainings were brought into real-world scenarios. For example, the Chipotle case study really went deep into the Due Diligence aspect that gave us a really good idea of the amount of research that needs to be done before building models with assumptions. These concepts would thereby be reinforced during the weekly lectures, which made the learning more interactive and engaging.

Although by the end of the program I no longer wanted a career switch, the soft and technical skills that I’ve built have skyrocketed. Even if you don’t know where you want to step foot into a career within the Financial Services industry, the soft and technical skills that you will learn in this program are absolutely transferrable to both your personal life and professional work.

Internship Experience

The internship was the most exciting part of the program, as we got to apply the knowledge we had in training to formulate investment opinions on various transactions (M&A,LBO, or Valuation Analysis on common shares). Romero’s in-depth understanding and experience of best practices in the industry and the way the videos are set up makes it very easy to apply what you’ve learned from the video into your presentation/model. For example, Romero’s training on formatting presentations and financial models in Excel enables you to create board/executive level ready reports that you won’t learn until you actually step foot into the industry.

Mentorship

The one-on -one mentorship was very helpful for me. This helped me with reinforcing concepts and digging further into questions that maybe the videos did not cover or could not find a clear answer on the internet. For example, reviewing with my mentor, Drake, the Amazon pre-internship presentation helped me understand how much detail needs to be in a presentation, as well as simple tricks on how to avoid and catch errors within your presentation to make it the utmost professional.

Career Development

Although by the end of the program I no longer wanted a career switch, the soft and technical skills that I’ve built have skyrocketed. For example, the learning of Excel shortcuts and Powerpoint best practices have carried over into my professional career that allow me to work more efficiently. I would also say that repeatedly calculating specific financial metrics in different scenarios, such as Enterprise Value (EV), really helped me reinforce the concept. Determining whether line items should be included in the calculation also made me learn about the variability in which EV can be calculated. All of this gives me a deeper practical understanding of financial terms such as EV, which is heavily utilized term used in the industry that I work in.