6 Free Financial Modeling Lessons...and More.

Background
I randomly discovered WSO nearly seven years ago just weeks after I secured a FT MM IB position. The website was extremely nascent at the time with only a few thousand registered users. The majority of the users were college students with only a handful of people actually working in investment banking. Like many new users today, I became engrossed in learning as much as I could about banking and spent a tremendous time reading everything on the site.

Throughout my two banking years, I did my best to share my experiences with the community. As one of the most senior members on the site (as an analyst, no less), there were relatively few people who could answer my questions about PE or assist me in building my career. At the time, I felt as though I wasn't getting anything out of the site despite putting a lot of effort in.

Fast forward to my first PE job and I was finally in a position to really mentor people looking to break into banking and PE. I started getting a lot of inquiries from not only college kids, but bankers as well. Luckily PE isn't as taxing hours-wise and I had the time to email/talk/meet with folks and do my best to help them out. I still hadn't seen any tangible benefit from my now 1,000+ hours on WSO, but at least I was having fun.

There are 11 days remaining until the conference (June 29th) and each day we'll be listing off another reason for why you should join us at the conference.

Reason #11:Joshua Pearl (co-author of Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and Mergers & Acquisitions) will also be in attendance. He will be sitting on panel #2 “Resume and Interview Best Practices”.

Bio: Joshua Pearl is an investment analyst at Brahman Capital Corp. Previously, he structured and executed leveraged loan and high yield bond financings, as well as leveraged buyouts and restructurings as a Director at UBS Investment Bank in Leveraged Finance. Prior to UBS, he worked at Moelis & Company and Deutsche Bank.

See inside for more reasons...

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Let me preface this by saying that I think learning multiple languages is one of the most important skills a person can develop in life. I myself know a few, and can get by in a few others. Some languages can even make you more employable. According to CNBC, however, Manadarin Chinese isn't one of them.

I personally believe that learning Chinese will be very helpful over the coming decades, but the article makes several very good points. I know it was targeted at Europeans learning Mandarin, but the same applies to North Americans. Unless you are relatively young (no older than mid-20s) and have a couple years to devote to it, you should probably give Mandarin a pass - at least if you're only learning it to get a job in China.

The issue is that it Mandarin is an extremely difficult language to learn, with much different tonalities than Western languages. Additionally, without a written alphabet per se, there are more than 3,000 Chinese characters that must be memorized for any kind of written language proficiency.