Story
During the five years of his undergraduate studies in Slovakia, Ivan took introductory courses on a broad range of topics in Business, Accounting, Finance, Computer science, and Mathematics. Looking for a challenge, he chose to major in Econometrics and Operations Research. In Bratislava, Ivan learned programming in Pascal, JAVA, and SQL. He has also learned to speak German fluently during his study abroad at the Martin-Luther University in Halle (Saale).
Upon graduation Ivan took an academic route, joining the U.S.-accredited Economics program at CERGE-EI in Prague. At CERGE-EI, Ivan has received a very rigorous, mathematical training in Economics. He has taken courses in Statistics, Econometrics, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and Financial Economics. He has also worked as Teaching Assistant for an undergraduate microeconomics course and as Research Assistant for Dr. Zemcik. With Dr. Zemcik, Ivan has co-authored a discussion paper in the field of Real Estate Finance that he presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Real Estate Society in 2008. Additionally, Ivan was awarded a World Bank Fellowship in 2007 for his proposed study of stock market participation. Ivan has acquired a list of skills at CERGE-EI that enable him to tackle most analytical tasks in business or academia. Ivan has worked with Stata, Eviews, TSP, Matlab, and Gauss. He has also learned to type documents in LaTex and write FORTRAN code.
After two-years in the Economics program in Prague, Ivan left CERGE-EI with a MA degree to pursue Finance studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. His main motivation for this move was to gain specialized knowledge in Financial Economics. At Florida, Ivan has done coursework in Accounting, Corporate Finance, Market Microstructure, and Asset Pricing. He has attended seminars at Departments of Economics, Finance, and Accounting and also dropped in to listen to professional speakers to talk to students about Finance and Real Estate. During his work as a Research Analyst for Dr. Miles Livingston, Ivan has learned to work with most major financial databases available to academics, including the Bloomberg terminal.
After graduating with a MS degree from the University of Florida in May 2009, Ivan returned to Slovakia, where he is currently working as an Investment Analyst for a Corpia Group a.s., a private wealth management firm. His tasks include monitoring the financial markets, analysis of individual securities, due dilligence for private equity transactions, and acting as a liaison with private banking divisions of global banks. Ivan is currently preparing for the first CFA exam and studying Mandarin Chinese.
