Learning excel in high school

I want to have as much of an edge as I can compared to my peers. I know that financial modeling is extremely important in finance. Is becoming fluent in excel worth it.

P.S don’t tell me to enjoy my highschool years. I’m not going to be grinding spreadsheets 24/7. I just want to know if dabbling in it is a good way to get ahead.

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Absolutely not - practicing without a real goal in mind will only be a waste of time. I have this issue right now where I try to study up for buyside recruiting, but just end up half assing it or getting distracted. It’s hard to find motivation when there’s going to be no immediate application of what you’ve learned.

Excel isn’t as difficult as you think and many people just end up learning on the job. If you really want to make use of your time, then I would spend it learning a skill / doing something interesting you’ve always wanted to do. Start going to the gym, learn to hoop, play guitar or whatever it may be.

Then before your start an internship, spend 2 weeks grinding through excel and you’ll learn / retain all the info a lot better.

There a lot of things I would change if I could go back in time and re-live my high school life, but one of them is definitely not getting better at excel.

 

I’ll offer a different view. You’re a kid and you should enjoy yourself but if you have time and interest then go for it. Yes, you need a purpose to learn it so make one up. Google macabacus and read through their operating model tutorials (ignore the M&A/LBO models, not relevant to you for a while) then download the full operating model and see how it’s formatted/linked up. You should understand the basics of how the financial statements work and are linked together. Then comes the potentially interesting/useful bit - pick a public consumer or tech company you like and go find their most recent 10-K. Read it cover to cover, take notes on what you think is important and write down questions. Try and understand how their revenue model works, how their expenses get built up, how their margins change, how much capital investment is required each year and anything else that impacts earnings/free cash flow. Then try and replicate an operating model using the macabacus template and the 10-K. Format and try to make it look as good as you can. If you do that and let me know when you have, you can send to me and I will go through it and provide real feedback.

 

Thought this was a troll post but turns out it isn't. I'm curious - how did you learn/ hear of IB in high school? I didn't hear of IB until some time later and even then I assumed investment bankers invest the deposits of banks LOL.

 

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