Bachelors in Finance and Accounting

GPA: 3.9

College was a place that challenged me to take ownership of my learning. Several key projects gave me learning opportunities that would help develop my career in the fields of Software Development and Finance.

While I am proud of the following projects, they by no means capture the extent of learning through the personal reading and learning that I did outside of the required curriculum.

1. Investment Analysis

This project challenged me to present an analysis of Bonds, Index Funds, and Stocks. Our metrics focused on value and risk as we used fundamental and technical analysis to determine whether we would advise our "clients" to buy the securities we analyzed. It challenged me to understand how certain ratios and formulas could be used to value a company as well as the inherent limitations of many of these formulas. I learned how to capture and analyze new information that could effect the valuation of each company.

I discovered that doing my best to calculate the Risk, Payout, and Timing of each investment seemed to create the most compelling arguments for making investments.

2. Machine Learning Algorithms

This final project for my directed study challenged me to build a Neural Network. This class walked me through key algorithms and calculus for ML. More importantly, it opened me up to supplementing my coursework with self-guided learning through Coursera and other platforms. I learned more Python, and became familiar with the Tensorflow and Keras libraries. I learned how to deploy ML models to the Cloud using Google Cloud Platform. And, I learned about the theory and strategies to build great ML models.

My final project was a Neural Net that predicted housing prices using Python, Keras, and Google Cloud Platform, and the journey I took to build this project taught me lessons that I would be sure to use on many future projects.

Some of the courses I took include:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-tensorflow-gcp

3. Financial Statement Audit + Internship

Auditing taught me how to read Financial Statements with an eye that would catch important details. It taught me how to build the processes to accurately collect important data, then to understand this data in ways that bring meaningful insights to the process and business owners. In this project and internship I audited through almost all the sections of Financial Statements from Revenue to Liabilities. This journey taught me not only about the rote processes that are necessary to audit financial statements, but about the opportunities for data analysis and programming to make these processes more efficient.

4. C++ Application

While C++ isn't the sexiest language, it was very helpful to understand core concepts that would prove useful while picking up many other languages. Learning about memory management and things that higher-level languages automatically takes care of for you, gave me an insight into what the higher-level languages take care of behind-the scenes. This reservation app may have been simple overall, but it allowed me to use many of the core-concepts I learned throughout the class.