Many of his assignments he loves to assign include little to nothing relevant to the music
industry. The most we discuss about music is within our discussion post in which he makes us
take the readings he has assigned and contextualize them. He does not do this himself. Some of
these “assignments” are also simulations in which most people are just pressing buttons, do not
want to pay for them, and are irrelevant to the course. He does not include these in the syllabus
for us to budget for the costs of these materials as well. Which is ironic considering this is a
finance and accounting course. The last of these simulations we did was a negotiation simulation
in which we were put either in the role of a recruiter or interviewee. This simulation experience
was pointless and irrelevant to anything we “learned” in the class. With nothing to do with
finances, it made zero sense as to why students would pay for these simulations. As well, with
not being included on the syllabus, he still expected everyone to buy them and had little
sympathy for anyone who could not afford them.
Lack of experience and push of self learning stays present as like I mentioned, he
rambles. In return, he goes on to say he makes asynchronous lectures for our benefit to discuss
actual finance. This indicates he is self aware, but not willing to change the way he teaches the

class. In return, it is unclear whether watching these is required or not. He says he checks to see
who is watching them and that he can see, seemingly as a threat to take participation points, but
also says we don’t have to watch them. These videos are him going through meaningless slides
in which he just restates everything in the readings. Not contextualizing anything into these
videos.

Mr. Beamer's class was a fun class! He brought in a great variety of speakers (a couple are mentors of mine now) and he facilitated great discussions, and I loved the harvard simulations he incorporated into the course. He put in a lot of effort to make the material engaging. he was very understanding when I had to miss class due to scheduling conflicts, which was a big help.

That said, I felt like there could have been more support from the music school in terms of resources and technology. It seemed like Mr. Beamer was doing his best with limited tools, and with more backing, the class could have been even better. Despite these challenges, he made the most of what was available and created a worthwhile learning environment. A kind soul!

I don't know why this professor has poor reviews. Mr. Beamer was one of the most charismatic and passionate professors I had especially considering the new topic he was teaching. I learned a lot about finance through this class and had fun doing it. He quizzes and tests were hard, but if you followed the text book readings they were manageable and he gave multiple opportunities to make up points.

Mr. Beamer was a thoroughly engaging professor. Each lecture felt like it had a purpose and a mission to achieve. They were deeply relevant, spanning the personal finance goals of a musician to understanding corporate accounting through balance sheets, income statements, and other general accounting statistics.

While accounting may not be everyone's cup of tea, Mr. Beamer made class participation a center point and was always extremely attentive to our learning objectives. Reaching him by email or after class was made very accessible, and he would always reply with helpful advice, even at odd times of the day.

Through in-depth simulations, Mr. Beamer showed us just how actionable our newly learned skills would be. Acting out team-building exercises and sometimes competitive simulations gave us a glimpse into what the real business world looks like while keeping it simple enough for us to understand.

As Mr. Beamer would regularly say, we are in a VUCA world (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), and informed financial planning is the best we can do, whether it involves managing tour budgets, or investing in a ROTH IRA. I highly recommend this class to anyone who wants a compassionate and caring professor and Mr. Beamer is one. His passion is infectious!

The best compliment I can give this class is that Professor Beamer seems to genuinely care about his students. He responds to emails and every single student's weekly discussion posts in an extremely efficient way. I'm sure he's a nice guy outside of finance class, but this efficiency does not extend to the actual lecturing part of his job. We were given a ridiculously dense finance textbook for our required readings, the content of which Professor Beamer never went over in any of his lectures, which happened twice a week for around 3 hours in total during which he talked a lot about nothing. This meant that most of my learning this quarter was from the Internet, which is okay here and there, but not okay if you basically end up teaching yourself all of the course material for ten weeks straight, because then what is the point in going to class at all? Furthermore, Professor Beamer would post even more recorded lectures online for us to view outside of class, during which he did actually go over some concepts, but it ended up not making sense why we were essentially being told to go to class outside our in-person class time since this was never meant to be a bimodal class. To succeed in this class, you had to go astronomically above and beyond to understand concepts independently, the cost of which greatly outweighs the knowledge that you gain.