Investment Banking exam

I have my first Columbia exam next Monday. It's a mid-term (20%) for my Investment Banking course.

I've been a little dissatisifed with this course so far. The classes are very difficult to prepare for as the professor does not provide very detailed notes and I don't have the experience/know how to provide enough intuition for the cases, however when I attend the classes the guest speakers are fantastic - lots of real-world experiences and heaps of insight. So far I've had the honour to hear from the CEO of collapsed west coast investment bank Robertson Stephens, the equity captial markets bankers who helped JetBlue go public in 2002, and the debt capital markets bankers who recently did a US$1 billion debt issue with an interest rate swap for FirstData Corporation.

For our mid-term exam, the professor has asked us to memorise a collection of industry terms that we would be expected to know if we worked in the industry. Most of them are fairly standard finance terms like maturity, volatility, warrant, and arbitrage, but we're also expected to know what NASDAQ stands for (about as useful as knowing what PCMCIA stands for), and how the fees for an IPO are distributed amongst the investment banks involved (very important).

I'll admit - I've learnt a great deal in this course, but I've been taking a passive approach to learning in a course where the professor's expecting me to be active. It's a good thing that only my pass/fail status will be reported back to Melbourne for this one as I don't expect I'll do very well. (This has been my approach for most of the subjects I've undertaken here at Columbia - I'm doing courses that will challenge me rather than those that I can cruise through and get a high grade).