Mahmoud Hamada

Giving my first lecture happened by coincidence. In 2001, I was in final year of the PhD program at the actuarial studies department at the university of New South Wales in Sydney. One day, Professor Estate Khmaladze could not make it to the lecture so he called me to his office and asked if I could replace him. Joyfully, I accepted his proposal, so he went through the lecture on the white board in a very clear concise manner.

 

That was my first experience, successfully delivering a 3 hour lecture in statistics to 120 second year students. It felt great..

Two years later, while working in the financial services industry, I met the master of applied finance course coordinator in Sydney Financial Mathematics Workshop, (a series of seminars organized by a branch of Q-group Australia) who asked me if I could teach Investment Management course, part of their Masters/MBA program at UTS.

 

I managed to squeeze 3 hours per week lecturing at UTS while working full time at Energy Australia. My lecture preparation was done in the weekends and some time during the week. It was exciting to have students who were eager to learn, since many of them were having a job and are enrolling in the program out of passion.

I kept teaching for 9 consecutive semesters (4.5 years) at UTS where I increased my teaching hours to 6 hours a week ( 2 evenings a week) lecturing both Investment management and Synthetic financial products courses.

The interaction with my students was so great that I was meeting up with them at lunch time going through their spreadsheets and giving them advices about their careers. The word of mouth spread around, and I was receiving emails from future students asking which day I would be teaching so that they enroll in my course.

 

Before my last semester in Sydney, my previous thesis supervisor, Michael Sherris, asked me to teach at the actuarial studies department, where I did my PhD. What an honor!

Teaching at the actuarial studies was even more exciting, since the percentage of bright students was much higher than in UTS. I thoroughly enjoyed the mathematical proofs on the board and the scientific discussions about portfolio allocation, risk measures, option pricing, conditional expectations and all the enticing mathematical finance topics.

It seems that my feelings were reciprocal to my students.. this showed clearly on their anonymous feedback at the end of the course.. (please check this out in this page link)