Dr. Pamela Coats

Dr. Pamela Coats is known for offering her financial modeling students “a lifetime guarantee” of continued help.

“I feel I have a personal stake in each of you. So I expect you to take care of yourselves. Model up. Validate. And don’t take uncalculated risks,” Coats writes her students.

Her students know she means it. Quick to answer e-mail, always available for office visits, Coats has spent countless hours helping students fine-tune formula-driven Excel spreadsheets and Monte Carlo scenarios.

“Modeling is all about competitive advantage, risk-free experimenting, exploring options, seeing consequences, honing intuition – all make for being the best-prepared decision-maker at the table,” Coats said.

In her rigorous course, students are presented with real-life scenarios they must model using interacting financial formulas. The resulting work provides clients with an ever-changing picture of a firm’s situation, allowing them to “turn on a dime” as factors change, Coats said.

“Every decision in business is a financial decision,” she said. “Finance is just the art of evaluation.”