Bond University recently became one of only three universities in Australia and 17 worldwide to have been accepted as a member of the global Bloomberg Experiential Learning Partner (ELP) Program.
“The ELP Program recognises and showcases academic institutions that are leaders in experiential learning through the integration of Bloomberg terminals in their curricula,” said Bond Business School’s Trading Room Supervisor, Dean Earea.
“Bond Business School now has a total of 40 Bloomberg terminals primarily located in the Macquarie Trading Room and Business Technology Centre,” he said.
“Bloomberg terminals are staples among practitioners undertaking financial analysis, so to have so many of them available for a relatively small cohort of students to access is quite incredible.
“We have undergraduate students using them to access live data and to learn how to execute trades; we have Masters’ students mining historical data for all different types of asset classes and investments; and we have PhD candidates conducting research based on real-time market interactions.
“We also offer free training to students from across the University, allowing them to get their official Bloomberg Market Concepts (BMC) accreditation that is recognised worldwide.”
Bond graduate Lachlan Farr says that the experiential learning available to him during his Master of Actuarial Science gave him a significant advantage in launching his career at the Commonwealth Bank.
“I started in the bank’s Institutional Banking and Markets Graduate Program, working on structured deals for big corporate and government clients,” he said.
“Bloomberg is the primary source of data for building those financial models and it was great to have had that hands-on, practical experience on the terminals at Bond before I started at the bank.
“It meant that I didn’t need to spend a lot of time being taught how to use the terminals because I already knew what I was doing.”
Through the ELP Program, Bloomberg aims to build a community of peer universities and academics that have the specialist skills to deliver innovative courses designed to build students’ financial market awareness and career readiness.
“We are extremely proud to have been chosen to join this elite cadre of Bloomberg partners,” said the Executive Dean of Bond Business School, Professor Terry O’Neill.
“The Bloomberg terminals have been at the heart of our practical financial markets training since Bond opened its first Macquarie Trading Room more than a decade ago,” he said.
“The combination of our small classes and the high number of terminals available helps us to ensure that our graduates have in-demand practical skills relevant to resources used by top tier industry professionals.
“They are also an integral part of Bond Business School’s benchmark Big Data Centre and Commercialisation Centre, launched last year as part of the faculty’s multi-million dollar redevelopment, to provide a dedicated space for students and staff to conduct in-depth analysis into trading strategies, big data and other finance-related research.”