Trying to Understand Finance? Try this Coursera Program

Aakanksha Murarka

06 April 2023

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Course Overview

Finance for Non-Financial Professionals program covers all major topics usually taken up in a full semester MBA finance course but, with a more intuitive approach. It imparts to learners a framework of how financial professionals make decisions like how a corporate financial manager would think and create the fundamental capital budgeting tools.

The course curriculum includes the fundamentals of financial valuation, such as the time value of money, compounding returns, and future discounting. You will learn how to value a company using Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and compare it with other methods. Through the program, you will examine how, when, and where to spend money and how to make tradeoffs between investment, growth, dividends, and fiscal discipline.

James P. Weston, Professor of Finance, Jones school, Rice University, was my instructor.

"This course unlike others, focuses on the time value of money, which every business and individual should know about while making investments. Overall, it offers a good introduction to the world of finance."

- Aakanksha Murarka

Course Structure

It is an online certification course and requires students to follow the instructor’s pace. This course starts with the principles in financial valuation, and later on deals with all the capital budgeting techniques and ends with a sunrise bakery expansion case study.

Importantly, this course focuses on the time value of money, which every business and individual should know about while making investments. It also highlights the importance of interest and discount rates while making an equity investment.

Insider Tips

To get the best out of this course, I have included some important tips that you might find useful.

Be Very Particular About Time

Coursera provides a very useful slot on the left-hand side of the website where one can create notes in their own words. The slot is also divided session-wise for the ease of the students.

Assessment

There were 4 weekly quizzes, 1 question, and 1 final cumulative quiz in the course. You can take assessments a maximum of 3 times in 1 go.

Prerequisites

This course does not require any prior knowledge of finance. Rather, it is intended to be a starting point for anyone interested in learning about stock markets, valuation, or corporate finance. The instructors go over all of the tools and quantitative analysis together with the learners and create a guide for understanding the seemingly complex decisions made by finance professionals.

Final Take

I am currently pursuing my Master in Business Administration, and without doubt, this course has been helpful right from the start . Adding to that, this course helped me not only in college but in real life too. I know where and when to invest my money by learning about the time value of money concepts. This course was selected by one of my professors during my bachelor's time.

This course is for both beginners and intermediate level as it gives a briefing about every topic discussed in the course. It is useful for all who want to make investments at a professional or personal capacity. This course provides guidance on different categories of projects that can be undertaken while going through this course.