About 120 Manatee County high school students recently took a field trip to the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus for a crash course on how the Muma College of Business — and especially the campus’s high-tech Bloomberg Lab — can help prepare them for a career on Wall Street.
The inaugural Bloomberg Day, sponsored by donor Steven Drelich as a way for the Sarasota-Manatee campus to use the lab for educational outreach, provided the students with primers on investments, high finance and other business-related topics presented by finance professor Eddie Sanchez, other faculty and alumni.
Sarasota-Manatee Regional Chancellor Karen Holbrook welcomed the students to campus.
Joni Jones, Sarasota-Manatee campus dean for the Muma College of Business, and Suzanne Gregalot, assistant director of admissions, pitched the students on how the offerings at USF can prepare graduates for successful business careers. Other breakout sessions on financial literacy and investments were led by Cumberland Advisors regional director of investments Todd Engelhardt, president and CEO John Mousseau and Sarasota-Manatee alum Lindsey Aleman, also with Cumberland Advisors, an investment management firm in Sarasota.
A centerpiece of the business program at the Sarasota-Manatee campus is the David Kotok and Cumberland Advisors Bloomberg Lab. The lab hosts 10 Bloomberg Terminals that allow students access to real-time data from markets around the world, in addition to news, research, and powerful analytics used by top decision-makers in finance, business and government. More than 300 USF students have received a comprehensive introduction to financial markets through the Bloomberg Market Concepts e-learning course and earned a certificate of completion — and gained an invaluable edge when seeking a job in the industry.
Bloomberg Terminal software is now becoming available for students and teachers at some Manatee County public high schools, thanks to funding from a special property tax approved by county voters to, in part, boost curriculum programs, said Cynthia Saunders, superintendent of the School District of Manatee County.
Last year, three subscriptions to Bloomberg Terminal software were installed at Southeast High School for students dually enrolled at the Sarasota-Manatee campus, and this year they are also going in at Lakewood Ranch and Manatee high schools, for students in AP economics classes. Teachers at the schools are taking the BMC courses through USF so they can incorporate the terminals into their lessons, said Kathryn Wald, an instructional and curriculum coordinator with the School District of Manatee County.
Saunders said officials hope to eventually install Bloomberg Terminal software at all of the county’s high schools.
Professor Sanchez, who demonstrated some of the capabilities of the Bloomberg Terminal software as students visited the lab, called it the “Ferrari of financial applications.” In the competition for entry-level jobs in finance or for spots in graduate schools, listing a Bloomberg Market Concepts certification on a resume or application can make a big difference, said Sanchez, who formerly worked on Wall Street as a hedge fund portfolio manager and securities analyst.
High school students who want to learn more about the Muma College of Business at the Sarasota-Manatee campus can take an extended tour of the campus.