The Link (Update 1)

Many students fail to see the importance of their collegiate education and how it relates to the 'real world'. My goal, in a series of posts starting here on out, is to link the academic world experiences to that of the work world. First though I feel a little bit of background would be appropriate.

My name is obviously Tony Zipparro, and I am 21 years old with a BSB in Finance and MBA from Eastern. While at Eastern I started the shells of a Hedge Fund entity in August 2008. During that time I slowly got my ducks in a row so that upon December 2009 graduation me and the 3 other partners I brought on could go full-speed. Since graduation we have been running our business operations out of Vernon Hills, IL and the experience has been exciting to say the least.

The LINK that most prominently comes to mind is that of knowing your Microsoft Office package through-and-through. Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Access are invaluable tools for keeping our business running and thriving. For this post I will be selfish and focus on an area of Office I have always loved: Excel.

EXCEL...CASE & POINT:

Our company is a leading player in the industry and attracting much attention partly due to the speed and accuracy at which we can analyze and pick investments. We can take complex processes and break them down to less than 1 minute calculations and visuals. How do we do this? Excel. I have always been an avid user of excel. The charts, spreadsheets and other basic functions are immensely useful. But what few people know is that it has the power to do pretty much whatever you want. Through the use of Macros/VBAs, you can upload live data from he internet, have the data analyzed in the spreadsheet and see exactly what you need to see.

While these advanced uses may seem trivial, it is not just these functions that are useful. At Eastern all business students take an introductory course to Word, Excel and Access. Most blow it off. But the major advantage when going out into the world is in these Office product competitive advantages versus your peers. Businesses consistently look for savvy young individuals that can plug out an Excel sheet to show them what they want. Conditional formatting is HUGELY important for putting a visual to numbers. Utilizing simple formulas and pairing them with others, drastically reduces the time you need to spend doing the 'grunt work'.

The bottom line is that with a well-versed background in Excel, you become a great threat to others trying to get the job. Not only will you provide the company with a more efficient way to analyze their hoards of data, but you will make your first few years out a lot less 'number-intensive'. It took me years and studying beyond the classes that Eastern offered to get to my current level, but my level of expertise should not be yours. The first goal you should set for yourself is to learn the basics and actually listen to what your BUS 1950 professors say (EVEN THOUGH IT IS ONLY YOUR 1st OR 2nd SEMESTER IN).

My life is inexplicably easy (in terms of sifting through data) when all I have to do is click once and I automatically get over 2,000 correlations between 50 different stocks. But it took hard work to get there.