This Week At CART – Destiny Lor

Greetings! My name is Destiny Lor, and I am a CART Ambassador currently attending the Business and Finance lab as a senior. In this lab, we learn how to manage our money, how to use Excel sheets, and what to expect when starting our own business.

In Business and Finance, we work on various projects that cover the aspects of finance and maintaining a business. In Project One, we worked on financing and estimating our money as a college student on an excel sheet. This project was helpful because it showed me how to utilize excel sheets and provided an estimate of how much I would be spending in the real world, living as a full time college student. In our second project, we worked on opening a food truck business. I enjoyed this project because it pushed my group and I to explore our creativity and learn the struggles as a new business owner. Furthermore, it gave me a better understanding on how to solve and adapt to problems that may conflict with the business. Apart from this, our recent project was learning how to invest in stocks using the Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500). The S&P 500 is the top 500 stocks that are publicly being traded throughout the US. In this project, we picked our top 20 stocks and observed them in a 2 month period. During this 2 month period, we weighed each stock to a certain percentage, as well as evaluated each stock’s P/E ratio (price to earnings) and the Beta (risk). This all resulted in showing how much money we would profit from all of our 20 stocks in a 10, 20, and 30 year period. I would say this has been one of my favorite projects because we learned the risks of the stock market and learned how to evaluate them.

As a student who struggles with speaking skills and communication, I believe my time at CART has helped me strengthen those weaknesses of mine. CART showed endless opportunity for me to grow and pushed me to achieve more. I enjoy that all labs at CART focus on critical thinking and connections. I believe they are important resources to have in the future and in the work field. I recommend students apply to explore their career choices here at CART and to achieve goals of their own.