Overview

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This Specialization is designed to equip you with a basic understanding of business finance, accounting, and data analysis. We've put together these three courses with the explicit intent of helping people prepare for the rigors of a prestigious MBA program, as well as introducing and refreshing basic knowledge and skills for aspiring business leaders. Having taught at Rice for nearly a combined 40 years, professors James Weston and Brian Rountree have found that entering students often lack confidence in some fundamental quantitative skills, as well as struggling with accounting and finance mechanics and terminology. As a result we have put together a series of lectures, plenty of practice opportunities and video walk-throughs that will allow you to confidently take a seat at the leadership table.

Syllabus

Course 1: Pre-MBA Quantitative Skills: Accounting
- Offered by Rice University. Financial statements are a key source of information about the economic activities of a firm. This course is a ... Enroll for free.

Course 2: Pre-MBA Quantitative Skills: Finance
- Offered by Rice University. This short course surveys all the major topics covered in a full semester MBA level finance course, but with a ... Enroll for free.

Course 3: Pre-MBA Quantitative Skills: Data Analysis
- Offered by Rice University. This course will equip students with the quantitative skills needed to begin any Masters of Business ... Enroll for free.

Courses

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13 hours 57 minutes
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This short course surveys all the major topics covered in a full semester MBA level finance course, but with a more intuitive approach on a very high conceptual level. The goal here is give you a roadmap and framework for how financial professional make decisions. We will cover the basics of financial valuation, the time value of money, compounding returns, and discounting the future. You will understand discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation and how it compares to other methods. We also step inside the mind of a corporate financial manager and develop the basic tools of capital budgeting. We will survey the how, when, and where to spend money, make tradeoffs about investment, growth, dividends, and how to ensure sound fiscal discipline. Our journey then turns to a Wall Street or capital markets perspective of investments as we discuss the fundamental tradeoff between risk and return. We then synthesize our discussion of risk with our valuation framework and incorporate it into series of direct applications to practice. This course requires no prior familiarity with finance. Rather, it is intended to be a first step for anyone who is curious about understanding stock markets, valuation, or corporate finance. We will walk through all of the tools and quantitative analysis together and develop a guide for understanding the seemingly complex decisions that finance professionals make. By the end of the course, you will develop an understanding of the major conceptual levers that push and pull on financial decision making and how they relate to other areas of business. The course should also serve as a roadmap for where to further your finance education and it would be an excellent introduction of any students contemplating an MBA or Finance concentration, but who has little background in the area. Note: This course has been ported from the "Finance for Non-Financial Professionals" from James Weston and Rice University. If you have already attempted or completed that course, your progress will carry over to this instance.
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17 hours 15 minutes
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Financial statements are a key source of information about the economic activities of a firm. This course is a primer on the construction and basic interpretation of financial statements that should provide learners with a rudimentary understanding of the types of information included in the four primary financial statements: balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, and statement of stockholders equity. We will spend time recording transactions using accounting terminology and then building financial statements from those transactions to provide you with an understanding of how and why transactions influence the various financial statements. We will focus on the language of accounting including such terms as the accounting equation, debits and credits, T-accounts, journal entries, accruals versus cash flows, and more. By the end of the course learners will be able to understand the basic differences and similarities of the four financial statements, and will have developed a solid foundation to build upon in an introductory financial accounting course at the MBA level. It is ideally suited for those learners that have never taken a financial accounting course before, as well as for those students who would like to refresh their understanding of basic financial accounting concepts.