First-Year Seminar: Seeing, Believing and Understanding
“These are designed to be fun and enjoyable while you gain knowledge and a new perspective on information.” This is one of the goals stated on Professor of Finance Pat Fishe’s first-year seminar (FYS) “Seeing, Believing and Understanding” syllabus, describing assignments students will complete throughout the semester. All University of Richmond freshmen are required to enroll in a FYS, which are designed to offer the opportunity to explore varied interests across every school and several departments. Those who enrolled in Fishe’s course assuming the material would focus solely on this subject ended the semester with a much broader knowledge base than expected.
Fishe designed the course to introduce students to creative and visual ways to summarize information in graphic displays using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop as well as Microsoft Excel. “The most difficult part of the course is teaching students how to think and present data visually, like artists,” Fishe said. He is currently working on research to determine how investors use visual images to make buying and selling decisions.
Current student Sugandh Gupta said she enrolled in the course, because “the idea of quantifying qualitative data and analyzing complex visual information as a freshman was interesting. This class would give me the skill to make my financial information more palatable by supplementing it with attractive and useful visual aids.”
Students are first taken through the history of visual displays of information and its development over time, from various methods of communicating statistics of housing starts and building permits to primitive bar graphs and charts of the human life span. They then learn how media channels have evolved to communicate with simple (graphs, charts) or complex (photographs, movies, multipart graphs) images.
“I believe that this class will definitely help me to present any information in a strategic and attractive visual way. It will also improve my use of creativity during presentations and any visual projects,” said Morgan Snyder, a freshman currently enrolled in the course.
Snyder chose Fishe’s FYS, because she had heard from a peer that it was “very different than others. It involved creativity through digital design.” Planning to study business administration and marketing, Snyder believes this FYS has provided her with an early introduction to the Robins School of Business. “The Robins School is extremely impressive. The faculty already seem so dedicated, and the students are hardworking and determined,” she said. “This course has influenced me to consider a job that allows room for creativity and possibly involves visual design.”
With goals to eventually enter a career in the corporate financial services or investment banking industry, Gupta says this course has “reinforced my belief in my creative spirit, something I can apply to all classes henceforth.” Next year she will join Robins School students, who she sees as “highly motivated and enthusiastic students who want to positively impact the business world.”
Throughout the course Fishe uses publications such as The Wall Street Journal and USA Today to highlight the lessons he teaches, after which students use lab time to practice their newly acquired skills with design software working on individual and group projects. “I hope at the culmination of the course, they have the beginnings of a portfolio with which future employers will find value and appeal in their skills,” Fishe said.