Finance Seminar Series

Ph.D. Pre-Seminar Workshops

In conjunction with the Finance Seminar Series, the Ph.D. Pre-Seminar Workshop meets every other week each semester. Ph.D. students typically present two background papers for the week’s finance seminar or present their own work.

Overview and objectives

The workshop allows doctoral students to present background papers for the Finance Seminar Series, or to talk about their own research. The workshop aims to:

• Help students prepare for the upcoming seminar.
• Encourage them to read high-impact papers in finance.
• Allow them to improve their presentation skills.
• Help students learn about fellow students’ work.

Expectations and responsibilities

All Ph.D. students are expected to attend the workshop. Attendees should read at least the introduction of the papers to be presented and provide meaningful contribution to the discussion. Since students are at different stages of the program, they will benefit in different ways:

• First-year students – familiarize yourself with different areas of finance.
• Second-year or third-year students – explore an area of interest.
• Students seeking jobs – fine-tune your presentation skills and keep up with what is new in research.

The student coordinator schedules and assigns papers to presenters and tracks attendance. The presenter provides background papers and ties them to the Seminar Series paper. Doctoral students also present their dissertation or second-year paper in the fall semester.

Logistics

Workshop presenters are selected on a volunteer basis, and background and seminar series papers are not available until the week of the workshop. Students should inform the student coordinator if there are research areas of interest for presentation.

If there are no volunteers, the coordinator assigns papers to students who have missed workshops or to those who have not recently presented.

Discussion with Finance Seminar Series presenter

Following the seminar series presentation, doctoral students attend a meeting with the visiting scholar. A discussion leader is assigned to review the presenter’s vita and current research, and prepare questions to ask during the meeting.

The discussion leader meets with the faculty coordinator to review relevant points of discussion and interesting topics. While the main responsibility for running the discussion lies with the discussion leader, everyone is expected to contribute.