Posing in front of my college’s main building on the last day of finals.
Author: Elijah Clark | Majors: Finance, Accounting | Semester: Fall 2024
As my Fall 2024 semester abroad at CityU in Hong Kong comes to a close, I cannot describe the experience as anything less than life-changing. From breathtaking hikes to wild nights out to building trading algorithms with some of the smartest people I’ve met, I’m coming back to the States with a feeling of fulfillment and without a single regret. I feel I am returning as an entirely new person, excited to see what the rest of my student life and career will bring.
Hong Kong sparked a special interest in my search for study abroad programs because it is one of the major financial capitals of the world. Although I couldn’t take any accounting classes there due to differing reporting standards, and the psychology class selection was few, the fascinating coursework available for finance had me sold immediately. One course in particular, which I will talk about in detail, stood out as a major reason to choose CityU as my study abroad destination. As it turns out, I believe I am the first student from the University of Arkansas to undertake a semester abroad at CityU in Hong Kong, so I am honored to do so and hope I will be the first of many.
Academic Experience
What really separated this fall semester abroad in Hong Kong was the challenging and invigorating course content. I thought I knew quite a bit about finance already, but this semester was a true deep-dive into how much more there is to learn and how fascinating the learning experience is. I have never felt so captivated by my coursework. I will later explain some challenges with different teaching styles, but the content of my courses- especially my Derivatives and Trading Room Workshop courses- was amazing.
A course that I spent the majority of my time on and one I would love to highlight here is the unique Trading Room Workshop course. I was ecstatic to be accepted into this prestigious microstructure trading course; it was one of the main reasons I chose Hong Kong as my destination. During this course, we were given hands-on simulation trading experience in nearly all asset classes (stocks, options, commodities, fixed income, etc) and our grades were solely based on relative trading performance. In other words, if we were more profitable than the other students in the class we would earn a good grade; there were no other conditions to the grade we received. I absolutely loved this concept because I am great at hands-on and real-world live solutions, so it goes without mention that I excelled. I found myself at the top of the class in many of the individual hand-trading competitions, receiving bonus points for sharing my “strategy” with the class. The truth is, I did not feel like doing all the work just to share my strategy for free, so I simply told everyone to “buy low and sell high” in a variety of creative ways. After one of the cases I even made an illustration on the whiteboard, using a graphical representation of what “buying low” and “selling high” should look like. I got quite a few laughs, one of my team members took a great video of it (which unfortunately I can’t put on this blog), and I still received full bonus credit.
Speaking of team members, the Trading Room Workshop was a wonderful catalyst for meeting some of the smartest and most hardworking people of diverse backgrounds. I found myself in a team of 5 members, pictured below, who complemented my skills, inspired my creativity, and compensated for my shortcomings. These became some of my best friends and I have no doubt I would be honored to work with them in the future. Together, we developed a complex trading algorithm based on stock and ETF mispricing as our final project, leveraging intercomputer communication to beat out all other groups in the competition. I am more than willing to share our detailed strategy report and server/client code with anyone interested in the unique class. Despite most of us not having a background in Python, we spent countless hours collaborating to create something I could never have imagined being part of before this semester.
Finally, the general living environment (a 50-square-foot room to myself, practically a shoebox) and culture I submerged myself in allowed me much-needed time in solitude. For once in my life, I did not have any responsibilities outside of self-development. This unique environment propelled a philosophical and spiritual journey that wouldn’t have happened had I not taken this opportunity abroad. I truly felt that I was making the best use of my time when I was in Hong Kong, and I will continue that mindset through the rest of college, internships, and my career, constantly striving for improvement and growth.
Critiques, Differences, Challenges
Despite a wonderful Hong Kong student experience, a few unfortunate things bring it down a bit. Firstly, it seems obvious that the professors are hired to do research, not teach. None of my professors seemed to care at all about the class, none inspired me to learn, they all just read off of the slides and expected the students to study and learn on their own (I’ve noticed this is a cultural norm in HK, students learn much more on their own or from other students than from the lectures). Therefore, CityU or any HK university is great for conducting research, as the research standards are very high, but as an undergraduate student, the quality of lectures is not quite what I expected. Even the higher-level, in-depth courses I took did not have a high teaching standard. The content was fascinating, especially in my Trading Workshop class, but my professors made it obvious they did not care about the teaching side of their job and were not readily willing to help students. For example, in my trading class, oftentimes I tried thinking outside of the box and coming up with a different, creative, and innovative solution, only to be told to read the case file and do it how it was explained. This does not apply to real life, because the solutions my group and I were coming up with for some of the cases were creative and brilliant as real-world solutions, but this was not rewarded within the class. Aside from this, I am still extremely glad to have taken this trading class, because I made an immense leap in my computer and coding skills, I connected with a group of some of the smartest finance students I have met, and felt invigorated every day to come up with new ways to beat the other traders. The course, aside from the professor, is the best course I have taken in my studies to date without a doubt.
Another critique to bring up is an issue with the structure of assignments and midterms. During the first few weeks of the semester, we did seemingly nothing in all my classes, with very few assignments and not much content. Then, during a few weeks of midterms, we were completely bombarded with project after midterm after project. While the content was beneficial and I learned invaluable skills, the classes would’ve been more enjoyable if the structure had been a bit more spread out. I also think I would’ve been able to focus more on each topic if I had been given a balanced workload instead of having to cram everything for every class all at once. This is something I have now become grateful for in the Walton College of Business: most professors of similar classes communicate with each other and design their workload to accommodate the best experience for students taking these classes. I did not see this kind of effort made by professors at CityU, unfortunately. Nonetheless, the challenging and unique coursework, along with a collaborative environment consisting of bright students, made up for these issues by far.
However, these critiques I mention may have actually been beneficial to me. In my previous studies, I have become comfortable with a very structured and well-defined learning environment. I have taken caring professors for granted, and it has become a norm for me to receive careful guidance at every step of my learning process. Being thrown into a completely different learning environment in which students are expected to undertake nearly all of these responsibilities on their own and learn without much guidance helped me develop invaluable skills and processes for overcoming this change. While there were definitely frustrating conditions at times, looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing about my experience because improvement does not come from within my comfort zone. These critiques should not overshadow the previous section, as the amount of growth I experienced is owed in part to these issues. There is no doubt in my mind that every aspect of my experience, including the obstacles, lined up perfectly to create the most valuable growth environment for me.
Conclusion
Overall, my study abroad experience in Hong Kong was something I would not trade for anything else. I truly believe it has shaped me into a brand-new person, inspired and ready to take on all the beautiful challenges the world has to offer. I thank all the awesome staff at the University of Arkansas and the Walton College of Business who helped turn this dream into a reality.