Enthusiastic about everything that has to do with numbers and firms, Giorgia is now halfway through her second Master’s year at Baruch College. We catch up with her in her apartment in Manhattan, where she lives with her two colleagues. She devotes some of her free time before classes to tell us how she is spending these last months in the Big Apple before returning to Bolzano to finish her studies. 

The city, needless to say, is a great place to spend your time as a student even if it has changed a lot in the last year. Unluckily we have not been able to experience the campus life as we would have in a normal situation, but we still manage to hang out with some classmates of ours. The studies are really inspiring besides being very demanding. Certainly having the opportunity to be in a top-notch class, with many fellow students from other countries, with a lot of group work, makes up for the downside of still having to take classes online. Our professors are very smart and often, in addition to academics, we have financial industry professionals lecturing. Dealing with them is very compelling. 

Sure. Currently, I am working on an individual project with the aim of arriving at an evaluation of a fintech company through the prediction of future performance based on the past one and on the objectives of the firm itself. In the course of M&A we have been assigned a group project where we have to consider two existing companies to enter into an acquisition or merger process, or into some kind of strategic alliance, evaluate the optimal terms of the deal, the synergies that would be realized and the final value of the resulting company. Here you have the chance to learn by doing and for those who follow the lessons and do the assignments the final exam, in comparison to what we are accustomed to in Italy, is less stressful because the latter only accounts for 20% of the overall grade. So I would say it is an experience I would certainly repeat a thousand more times if I could decide. 

In fact, the prospect of being able to win this scholarship was one of the main factors that led me to choose the Free University of Bolzano for my Master's degree in addition to my Bachelor's degree. Also, knowing that I could count on a person like Prof. Massimiliano Bonacchi was a very important element in my decision. Finally, I had already been to the USA during my Bachelor's, having spent one quarter at a partner university in Seattle. I have always been fond of both life and the way of studying at the American university. Everything you do in classes I very real, you start putting it all into practice from the first moment and this is very close to my personality. I wouldn't have had the chance to attend a full master's degree in the USA because of the costs, thus the offer by unibz with the scholarships was an opportunity that I couldn't miss for anything in the world.

 

My scholarship was offered by the Bureau Plattner, an accounting firm in Bolzano, Merano, and Milan. I already have a pretty good experience in the world of business consulting, as I did an eighteen-month internship at the Bolzano-based company Tax and Legal Services, dealing with practices for tax relief and transfer pricing. If I hadn't come to the US, I would have been able to finish the year and a half of my internship with them and then take the exam to become a certified public accountant. The desire to take on a new challenge convinced me to temporarily put aside this goal, which I plan to attain as soon as I graduate. 

Yes, even though I have yet to graduate, I have already received a very tempting job offer. They offered me a position in their Milan office. It will be a great challenge in a new environment, but I'm looking forward to it. Right now, however, I have to concentrate on taking the exams that I have left here and in Italy and then work on my thesis. Here I came across the central idea of my thesis. Now I am collecting the data I need. 

I will be working on a thesis that combines econometrics and corporate law. Specifically, I will be doing an econometric analysis to understand if and how much the legal restrictions we have in Europe when it comes to startup foundation are hindering innovation and entrepreneurship, and to understand how much an alignment with US corporate law could help the creation and growth of startups and businesses.

(zil)