listening career group report NO.3

Reference: Shiller, R. (2008, January 14). Financial Markets: Finance and Insurance as Powerful Forces in Our Economy and Society. Open Yale Courses. Podcast Retrieved from:
http://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/media_viewer/video_viewer2.php?window_size=medium&type=flv&title=ECON%20252%20-%20Lecture%201%20-%20Prof.%20Robert%20Shiller&path=%2Fcourses%2Fspring08%2Fecon252%2Fflash%2Fecon252_01_011408

Summary:
According to lecture video “Finance and Insurance as Powerful Forces in Our Economy and Society”, Shiller talked about what he would teach in his course and the basic information about the course books. First of all, he introduced his five teaching assistants. All of them were PhD candidates. He has been teaching this course, ECON 252, over 20 years and he liked listening different opinions from different people. He thought finance was a very important technology and also very important for people to understand it in the real world. He would not put too many maths into his course because he knew many people who did not like math but still wanted to take this course. He said that his course books would help students reviewed the key points and key terms for the exams. Also,he would list the main points to help students took exams. At the end, he said his course might give students some ideas about how to do a business but students need to be careful about it.


Critique:
I chose this lecture because I want to know what finance lecture is talking about. The website listed all the lectures about this course. I just want to know the general information about the finance, so I chose the introduction part. In this part, the teacher introduced the basic information about what he will teach his course, what the finance happened in the real world, and his teaching materials. I agreed with him that finance became a very hot major in these few years. I was interested in it before because I heard a lot of successful people stories and they all did very good job. I know a lot of Chinese students want to study this area and they think this major can help them to find a better job than any other majors. However, in my opinion, the most important thing to choose a major is students' interest because it will provide more fun than choose a major for a future job which can earn a lot of money. It is really hard for people to face something that they do not like it and continue to do it for a long time. It will make them feel whiny and depressed. Nevertheless, sometimes there is no choice to choose the major by themselves for chinese students.