Market News with Rodney Lake
"Market News with Rodney Lake" is a show offering insightful discussions on market trends and key investing principles. This program is hosted by Rodney Lake, the Director of the George Washington University Investment Institute.
Market News with Rodney Lake
Episode 12 | A Conversation with GWSB Interim Dean Vanessa Perry About Real Estate Regulations and AI in the Future of Work
In Episode 12 of "Market News with Rodney Lake," Rodney Lake talks with Vanessa Perry, Interim Dean at the GW School of Business, about recent changes in real estate regulations and the expanding role of AI in the workplace. Dean Perry explains how new rules may impact home buyers and sellers, potentially complicating markets and adversely impacting affordability. She also discusses the growing use of AI in financial sectors, urging students to enhance their analytical skills to integrate these technologies effectively. Dean Perry emphasizes the importance of staying informed, networking strategically, and leveraging unique opportunities to prepare for success in a rapidly evolving finance industry. Tune in to learn more!
Episode 12 Transcript
Rodney Lake
Thank you for joining Market News with Rodney Lake. This is a regular program for the GW Investment Institute where we talk about timely market topics. I'm Rodney Lake, the director of the GW Investment Institute. Let's get started. Welcome back to Market News with Rodney Lake. I'm your host, Rodney Lake today is episode 12. We are here coming to you from the GW School of Business Duquès Innovation studio.
Rodney Lake
Fantastic day because today we're hosting our first guest, Dean Perry. Dean Perry is joining us. Dean Perry, thank you so much for joining market news with Rodney Lake. This is such an honor for us. Could you maybe talk about your background and your journey to becoming the dean at the GW School of Business?
Vanessa Perry
Sure. So thank you for having me. This is very exciting. Market news is going gangbusters, and so we're really happy about that. I had sort of a nontraditional path to academic administration. I started my career after the MBA program. As a, senior as well. I didn't start as a senior economist. I started as a financial analyst at Freddie Mac.
Vanessa Perry
I worked in, a group called Financial Research. And then, later became housing economics. I did, a lot of sort of financial analysis. I did, coding. I supported, a lot of our economists. I did special projects for the chairman and CEO, and really sort of came to be interested in affordable housing.
Vanessa Perry
And access to homeownership, as a, as part of the American dream, as part of a route to wealth accumulation and I still study those topics to this day. So, I left Freddie to go back to the doctoral program full time, which I did USC Chapel Hill. And, go heels. I'm allowed to say that on a G.W. production for.
Rodney Lake
Your awesome honor. You could say that.
Vanessa Perry
Yes. Did that, came out and then joined GW as an assistant professor. Came here because of its unique positioning in DC and because my research was, touched on the effects of, the public policy on business practices. It's was and is the ideal place for me to work and to study. And then after going through this sort of professor, pipeline, I became department chair and then associate dean.
Vanessa Perry
Vice dean. I was vice provost for diversity and inclusion for a year. Did a bunch of other things, but now here I am.
Rodney Lake
Excellent. That is a great set of experiences. And I'm going to touch on a couple of those. We're going to come back a specifically to your market expertise. I want to put a pin in that. We're going to come back to that. One of the things you mentioned I want to pick up on is GW's location. When you talk about the school of Business, we're here right in Foggy Bottom, right in the sort of the center of it all, as they say.
Rodney Lake
Can you talk to us about and tell, you know, their viewers and listeners, you know, why is that important? And how does GW School of Business specifically leverage our location?
Vanessa Perry
Sure. Get this question all the time, and it never gets old. I never get tired of talking about it because, you know, am I? I drive in to work every morning. I depending on which way I go, I pass the white House. I pass the Federal Reserve. I pass, the world Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Vanessa Perry
I pass, all of these, institutions which affect the global business world. And so the proximity that GW has to these institutions, to me, isn't just, symbolic because we actually interact with our alums who work there or leaders who actually come in and teach our courses. We have, faculty who collaborate on research with these institutions.
Vanessa Perry
They provide data for us and, lots of examples. The State Department is also bordering on our campus. And so the, global and international content that we're able to offer our students is unmatched because it turns out there is no other business school that has that kind of proximity to these institutions, even those that are within the Washington metropolitan area.
Vanessa Perry
So it's not just a symbolic thing. It's real and, you know, our students intern on Capitol Hill. Our students work with these institutions. They do, projects that involve, members of these communities. And so it just makes the GW business experience very, very unique and very special.
Rodney Lake
And I would highlight that as many of the students list, that is a top sort of reason why they come to GW. And so it's great to hear, directly from the dean here on all of that. Now I'm going to move on to the market. You mentioned sort of your expertise. You started the career at Freddie Mac, which makes you a superstar in, in the corporate world and now in the academic world.
Rodney Lake
So again, thanks for being here.
Vanessa Perry
I don't know about that. I don't know how you define superstar, but I'll take it.
Rodney Lake
Well, today for sure. But I think in general, so but let's, let's really work on this sort of area of commissions. So on the brokerage commissions, lots of people are concerned about, oh, there's all these big changes. It seems like nobody really understands what's going on. If you ask one person, it seems like you get one answer.
Rodney Lake
You ask somebody else, they get another answer. So let's hear your answer. You certainly are knowledgeable about this. You have spoken about this, so could you maybe outline what's actually happening with these things and what are some of those impacts?
Vanessa Perry
So I'll do my best because it is a very complicated set of issues. And it's complicated because homebuying is complicated. And the market for becoming a homeowner, or, and or selling a home, it's just a very complicated one. There's just a lot of, parties and intermediaries that are involved. So I'll do my best. So this all started when a group of sellers filed a class action suit against the National Association of Realtors and a number of multiple listing service.
Vanessa Perry
Now, multiple listing services provide, a service. They are, one of these intermediaries.
Rodney Lake
This is MLS.
Vanessa Perry
Versus MLS for everybody. And and you know, because MLS is, you know, sort of provide information both to and consumers but also help list properties that are for sale. And so real estate agents use them and in many cases consumers are able to access some of those data to, be able to sort of look at prices and find out what's out there.
Vanessa Perry
It's more complicated than that. Right. But but I'm not going to go into this.
Rodney Lake
It's two, three hours. Yeah.
Vanessa Perry
That's right, that's right. I'll I'll cut all that short. What the sellers were upset about is what they accused the industry of, which is price fixing, which, which the allegation was that when a person is selling a home, they are required to pay approximately 6% to, real estate agents split roughly half and half between the agent that is representing the seller and the agent that is representing the buyer.
Rodney Lake
And that's the way it's been.
Vanessa Perry
That's the way it's been, even though even that's not entirely true. But that's because those are that that rate has always been negotiable. But whatever the, the
Rodney Lake
Generally that's the way.
Vanessa Perry
Generally that's the way that it works. And courts obviously believed that that was very much, the standard. And so sellers were arguing we should not have to pay buyer's agent. And so one proposal, one sort of pushback alternative would be the kind of model that occurs in some other countries in which the buyer pays their agent out of their own pocket.
Vanessa Perry
Agents representing. Sounds easy right? It makes sense. If you have an attorney, for example, you pay your attorney out of your pocket. You might be able to recover some of those expenses later, depending on, you know, whatever outcome of whatever lawsuit or action you're taking. So simple. We'll just convert to that model. Well, it's actually not that simple because all of a sudden what you would be doing, in theory is asking the buyer to come out of their pocket for an additional 3%.
Vanessa Perry
That is not only, would that that is just unaffordable for a huge swath of the market, particularly for first time home buyers who can barely afford to come up with the funds they need for the down the down payment, which is.
Rodney Lake
3.5%. So that's for the for the low end bear. That's right. This is comparable to that even.
Vanessa Perry
That's right. And you say, you know that sounds like a non-trivial amount of money. Well, you know, as my dad pointed out for me, was looking at listings in DC. He said it was struggle for him to find one that was less than $1 million. So 3.5% of $1 million is a lot of money. 3.5% of $500,000 is.
Rodney Lake
A lot of $15,000 for 500.
Vanessa Perry
That's that's right. So people will struggle for years to be able to accumulate enough savings to be able to enter homeownership. And boom, now you're telling them, but they have to come up with this out of pocket. So then another group in the industry says, well, this is easily taken care of, right? Yeah. We just included in the mortgage.
Vanessa Perry
Well, you know, it turns out that Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, FHA, Veterans Administration, they're like, oh, yeah, no, no, you can't just do that. They have both policies. And in the case of the Veterans Administration, outright prohibitions from covering those costs the same way they might cover other, seller say, concessions, you know, so, I mean, that's all the concessions, but, but other expenses that go into closing costs, I don't want to get into this, but they're more.
Rodney Lake
Directly associated with the property. That's not the deal.
Vanessa Perry
That's right. So this is about the deal, not the property. That's a that's exactly the issue. And investors want to be able to value the property and the entire secondary, mortgage market, the entire housing finance system that's based on mortgage backed securities rests on the understanding that we're all on the same page about how to value the property.
Vanessa Perry
Right. And so when you start adding in all these other things, then you get noise, it gets confusing, and people are very wary of it. That's on the investment side. Back to the home buyer. Home buyers just won't be able to afford to pay these costs out of their own pocket. And so now what the industry's doing is trying to figure out how can we work around this, because these rules went to effect earlier this summer.
Vanessa Perry
And so that's kind of where we are trying to figure out how to work around this, because as it stands, a home buyer has to enter a written agreement with their agent before the agent. So shows them a home. And in that agreement, they have to stay. If the seller is not willing to pay the buyer's agent commission, then the buyer is responsible for it.
Vanessa Perry
Well, that's a very scary document to sign, right? I don't think I would sign it. I been at this for a very long time. And so, there's just a lot of confusion and a lot of debates going on about this issue.
Rodney Lake
Well, I don't think we solved the world's problems here today, but I'm very certain that you've helped everybody understand this situation a little bit better. So thanks for going over that. I think it's already built in. You're going to have to come back so we can actually spend some more time talking about once.
Vanessa Perry
It gets solved. I'm happy to come back and talk about it.
Rodney Lake
Well, thank you for lending your expertise for that part. So two more things I want to talk about before we wrap here. One is, you know, really connected to our students, but really for everyone, you know, AI is transforming the world and a whole variety of things. Maybe. Could you give us your thoughts about AI and the future of work, just generally speaking, and how our students might think about preparing themselves?
Vanessa Perry
So, I love this question because I turn to our students for guidance about AI because they know way more about it than that. I do, they're on top of these evolving technologies. AI is not new and has been transforming, work since I entered the workforce. And, you know, I mentioned my my time at Freddie Mac.
Vanessa Perry
Well, the, artificially intelligent algorithms have been used in sort of the, the mortgage industry, for many, many years. And now we're seeing an additional transformation because there's just more data available and more sort of computing power. But we've been on this trajectory for a long time. And so, you know, yes, it's going to change the way people's, people's jobs and job functions that are necessary.
Vanessa Perry
There's no question about that. Again, that's already happening. Yeah. So what our students need to do to prepare is one, be able to understand how to integrate artificially intelligent decision making in their decisions because our students are human. And so have real intelligence, right? Don't have to run AI, not artificial. They have actual intelligence. And the key is as intelligent being how beings how do we integrate these technologies to make our decisions more accurate, more efficient, and then help us do better at what only humans can do?
Vanessa Perry
And so that requires, focusing on, analytical skills more than we ever have before. Well, you know, computers, you know, crunch a lot of our numbers, but it's critical for us to understand what is what those, algorithms and what those computers are doing. Yeah. Because it is humans that are designing and coding these algorithms and these decisions.
Vanessa Perry
And so in order to be in that position, even if we're not all going to become coders, you have to be able to know what you need your coder to do. Right. And what would, what kinds of technologies and AI related solutions or actually going to make your business run more efficiently and more effectively.
Rodney Lake
A little bit of what are the right questions or questions to ask?
Vanessa Perry
That's right. What are the questions.
Rodney Lake
Informed enough to to know that?
Vanessa Perry
That's right. That is absolutely right.
Rodney Lake
Excellent. Well, we have time for just one more thing. For this episode, that could be a whole separate episode. AI and the future of work as well. So let's let's move on, though, to wrap up. So maybe you could just give us some your take advice words of wisdom on aspiring business students or anybody out there that's listening or watching us on YouTube.
Rodney Lake
You know, what advice would you give people who are studying business now or want to retrain themselves? What would you say to them?
Vanessa Perry
Oh, I would say, you know, definitely watch market news.
Rodney Lake
That's the no.
Vanessa Perry
Brainer. That's right. That's a no brainer. But, these kinds of opportunities to engage with business leaders, to find out what's going on, to stay current are essential. So that's one thing. There's just so much, information available in real time, but you have to make time to be able to absorb it because it's going on outside of the classroom.
Vanessa Perry
It's going on outside of your internships. The other thing I would suggest is, and you may have to schedule this as well, is time to focus on building your network, because that network is one of the most valuable things that GW students have access to. And this is something that is both needs to be intentional and strategic, but this is a network that you'll have throughout your career.
Vanessa Perry
If you are smart about it. And there's nothing wrong with taking time out to spend time with your classmates and engage with our many, many, many, very exciting and very, very active student organizations and, engaging with activities that involve GW, SB alums. There's nothing wrong with spending time on that. It may seem like you're wasting time, but you're absolutely not.
Vanessa Perry
It will pay off.
Rodney Lake
Excellent. Well, I want to thank you for your time, Dean Perry, very much. Thank you.
Vanessa Perry
For having me.
Rodney Lake
That is a wrap for episode 12 for Market News with Rodney Lake. See you on the next episode of Market News with Rodney Lake. See you then.
Rodney Lake
Disclaimer: The content shared by GW Investment Institute podcast is for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be considered investment advice. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the GW Investment Institute or the George Washington University. Listeners should not act upon the information provided without seeking professional advice from a qualified financial advisor.
Rodney Lake
Investing involves risks including the loss of principal. The GW Investment Institute. The George Washington University. And the podcast hosts do not assume any responsibility for any investment decisions made based on the content of this podcast. Always conduct your own research and consult with a financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
Episode 12 Transcript
Rodney Lake
Thank you for joining Market News with Rodney Lake. This is a regular program for the GW Investment Institute where we talk about timely market topics. I'm Rodney Lake, the director of the GW Investment Institute. Let's get started. Welcome back to Market News with Rodney Lake. I'm your host, Rodney Lake today is episode 12. We are here coming to you from the GW School of Business Duquès Innovation studio.
Rodney Lake
Fantastic day because today we're hosting our first guest, Dean Perry. Dean Perry is joining us. Dean Perry, thank you so much for joining market news with Rodney Lake. This is such an honor for us. Could you maybe talk about your background and your journey to becoming the dean at the GW School of Business?
Vanessa Perry
Sure. So thank you for having me. This is very exciting. Market news is going gangbusters, and so we're really happy about that. I had sort of a nontraditional path to academic administration. I started my career after the MBA program. As a, senior as well. I didn't start as a senior economist. I started as a financial analyst at Freddie Mac.
Vanessa Perry
I worked in, a group called Financial Research. And then, later became housing economics. I did, a lot of sort of financial analysis. I did, coding. I supported, a lot of our economists. I did special projects for the chairman and CEO, and really sort of came to be interested in affordable housing.
Vanessa Perry
And access to homeownership, as a, as part of the American dream, as part of a route to wealth accumulation and I still study those topics to this day. So, I left Freddie to go back to the doctoral program full time, which I did USC Chapel Hill. And, go heels. I'm allowed to say that on a G.W. production for.
Rodney Lake
Your awesome honor. You could say that.
Vanessa Perry
Yes. Did that, came out and then joined GW as an assistant professor. Came here because of its unique positioning in DC and because my research was, touched on the effects of, the public policy on business practices. It's was and is the ideal place for me to work and to study. And then after going through this sort of professor, pipeline, I became department chair and then associate dean.
Vanessa Perry
Vice dean. I was vice provost for diversity and inclusion for a year. Did a bunch of other things, but now here I am.
Rodney Lake
Excellent. That is a great set of experiences. And I'm going to touch on a couple of those. We're going to come back a specifically to your market expertise. I want to put a pin in that. We're going to come back to that. One of the things you mentioned I want to pick up on is GW's location. When you talk about the school of Business, we're here right in Foggy Bottom, right in the sort of the center of it all, as they say.
Rodney Lake
Can you talk to us about and tell, you know, their viewers and listeners, you know, why is that important? And how does GW School of Business specifically leverage our location?
Vanessa Perry
Sure. Get this question all the time, and it never gets old. I never get tired of talking about it because, you know, am I? I drive in to work every morning. I depending on which way I go, I pass the white House. I pass the Federal Reserve. I pass, the world Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Vanessa Perry
I pass, all of these, institutions which affect the global business world. And so the proximity that GW has to these institutions, to me, isn't just, symbolic because we actually interact with our alums who work there or leaders who actually come in and teach our courses. We have, faculty who collaborate on research with these institutions.
Vanessa Perry
They provide data for us and, lots of examples. The State Department is also bordering on our campus. And so the, global and international content that we're able to offer our students is unmatched because it turns out there is no other business school that has that kind of proximity to these institutions, even those that are within the Washington metropolitan area.
Vanessa Perry
So it's not just a symbolic thing. It's real and, you know, our students intern on Capitol Hill. Our students work with these institutions. They do, projects that involve, members of these communities. And so it just makes the GW business experience very, very unique and very special.
Rodney Lake
And I would highlight that as many of the students list, that is a top sort of reason why they come to GW. And so it's great to hear, directly from the dean here on all of that. Now I'm going to move on to the market. You mentioned sort of your expertise. You started the career at Freddie Mac, which makes you a superstar in, in the corporate world and now in the academic world.
Rodney Lake
So again, thanks for being here.
Vanessa Perry
I don't know about that. I don't know how you define superstar, but I'll take it.
Rodney Lake
Well, today for sure. But I think in general, so but let's, let's really work on this sort of area of commissions. So on the brokerage commissions, lots of people are concerned about, oh, there's all these big changes. It seems like nobody really understands what's going on. If you ask one person, it seems like you get one answer.
Rodney Lake
You ask somebody else, they get another answer. So let's hear your answer. You certainly are knowledgeable about this. You have spoken about this, so could you maybe outline what's actually happening with these things and what are some of those impacts?
Vanessa Perry
So I'll do my best because it is a very complicated set of issues. And it's complicated because homebuying is complicated. And the market for becoming a homeowner, or, and or selling a home, it's just a very complicated one. There's just a lot of, parties and intermediaries that are involved. So I'll do my best. So this all started when a group of sellers filed a class action suit against the National Association of Realtors and a number of multiple listing service.
Vanessa Perry
Now, multiple listing services provide, a service. They are, one of these intermediaries.
Rodney Lake
This is MLS.
Vanessa Perry
Versus MLS for everybody. And and you know, because MLS is, you know, sort of provide information both to and consumers but also help list properties that are for sale. And so real estate agents use them and in many cases consumers are able to access some of those data to, be able to sort of look at prices and find out what's out there.
Vanessa Perry
It's more complicated than that. Right. But but I'm not going to go into this.
Rodney Lake
It's two, three hours. Yeah.
Vanessa Perry
That's right, that's right. I'll I'll cut all that short. What the sellers were upset about is what they accused the industry of, which is price fixing, which, which the allegation was that when a person is selling a home, they are required to pay approximately 6% to, real estate agents split roughly half and half between the agent that is representing the seller and the agent that is representing the buyer.
Rodney Lake
And that's the way it's been.
Vanessa Perry
That's the way it's been, even though even that's not entirely true. But that's because those are that that rate has always been negotiable. But whatever the, the
Rodney Lake
Generally that's the way.
Vanessa Perry
Generally that's the way that it works. And courts obviously believed that that was very much, the standard. And so sellers were arguing we should not have to pay buyer's agent. And so one proposal, one sort of pushback alternative would be the kind of model that occurs in some other countries in which the buyer pays their agent out of their own pocket.
Vanessa Perry
Agents representing. Sounds easy right? It makes sense. If you have an attorney, for example, you pay your attorney out of your pocket. You might be able to recover some of those expenses later, depending on, you know, whatever outcome of whatever lawsuit or action you're taking. So simple. We'll just convert to that model. Well, it's actually not that simple because all of a sudden what you would be doing, in theory is asking the buyer to come out of their pocket for an additional 3%.
Vanessa Perry
That is not only, would that that is just unaffordable for a huge swath of the market, particularly for first time home buyers who can barely afford to come up with the funds they need for the down the down payment, which is.
Rodney Lake
3.5%. So that's for the for the low end bear. That's right. This is comparable to that even.
Vanessa Perry
That's right. And you say, you know that sounds like a non-trivial amount of money. Well, you know, as my dad pointed out for me, was looking at listings in DC. He said it was struggle for him to find one that was less than $1 million. So 3.5% of $1 million is a lot of money. 3.5% of $500,000 is.
Rodney Lake
A lot of $15,000 for 500.
Vanessa Perry
That's that's right. So people will struggle for years to be able to accumulate enough savings to be able to enter homeownership. And boom, now you're telling them, but they have to come up with this out of pocket. So then another group in the industry says, well, this is easily taken care of, right? Yeah. We just included in the mortgage.
Vanessa Perry
Well, you know, it turns out that Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, FHA, Veterans Administration, they're like, oh, yeah, no, no, you can't just do that. They have both policies. And in the case of the Veterans Administration, outright prohibitions from covering those costs the same way they might cover other, seller say, concessions, you know, so, I mean, that's all the concessions, but, but other expenses that go into closing costs, I don't want to get into this, but they're more.
Rodney Lake
Directly associated with the property. That's not the deal.
Vanessa Perry
That's right. So this is about the deal, not the property. That's a that's exactly the issue. And investors want to be able to value the property and the entire secondary, mortgage market, the entire housing finance system that's based on mortgage backed securities rests on the understanding that we're all on the same page about how to value the property.
Vanessa Perry
Right. And so when you start adding in all these other things, then you get noise, it gets confusing, and people are very wary of it. That's on the investment side. Back to the home buyer. Home buyers just won't be able to afford to pay these costs out of their own pocket. And so now what the industry's doing is trying to figure out how can we work around this, because these rules went to effect earlier this summer.
Vanessa Perry
And so that's kind of where we are trying to figure out how to work around this, because as it stands, a home buyer has to enter a written agreement with their agent before the agent. So shows them a home. And in that agreement, they have to stay. If the seller is not willing to pay the buyer's agent commission, then the buyer is responsible for it.
Vanessa Perry
Well, that's a very scary document to sign, right? I don't think I would sign it. I been at this for a very long time. And so, there's just a lot of confusion and a lot of debates going on about this issue.
Rodney Lake
Well, I don't think we solved the world's problems here today, but I'm very certain that you've helped everybody understand this situation a little bit better. So thanks for going over that. I think it's already built in. You're going to have to come back so we can actually spend some more time talking about once.
Vanessa Perry
It gets solved. I'm happy to come back and talk about it.
Rodney Lake
Well, thank you for lending your expertise for that part. So two more things I want to talk about before we wrap here. One is, you know, really connected to our students, but really for everyone, you know, AI is transforming the world and a whole variety of things. Maybe. Could you give us your thoughts about AI and the future of work, just generally speaking, and how our students might think about preparing themselves?
Vanessa Perry
So, I love this question because I turn to our students for guidance about AI because they know way more about it than that. I do, they're on top of these evolving technologies. AI is not new and has been transforming, work since I entered the workforce. And, you know, I mentioned my my time at Freddie Mac.
Vanessa Perry
Well, the, artificially intelligent algorithms have been used in sort of the, the mortgage industry, for many, many years. And now we're seeing an additional transformation because there's just more data available and more sort of computing power. But we've been on this trajectory for a long time. And so, you know, yes, it's going to change the way people's, people's jobs and job functions that are necessary.
Vanessa Perry
There's no question about that. Again, that's already happening. Yeah. So what our students need to do to prepare is one, be able to understand how to integrate artificially intelligent decision making in their decisions because our students are human. And so have real intelligence, right? Don't have to run AI, not artificial. They have actual intelligence. And the key is as intelligent being how beings how do we integrate these technologies to make our decisions more accurate, more efficient, and then help us do better at what only humans can do?
Vanessa Perry
And so that requires, focusing on, analytical skills more than we ever have before. Well, you know, computers, you know, crunch a lot of our numbers, but it's critical for us to understand what is what those, algorithms and what those computers are doing. Yeah. Because it is humans that are designing and coding these algorithms and these decisions.
Vanessa Perry
And so in order to be in that position, even if we're not all going to become coders, you have to be able to know what you need your coder to do. Right. And what would, what kinds of technologies and AI related solutions or actually going to make your business run more efficiently and more effectively.
Rodney Lake
A little bit of what are the right questions or questions to ask?
Vanessa Perry
That's right. What are the questions.
Rodney Lake
Informed enough to to know that?
Vanessa Perry
That's right. That is absolutely right.
Rodney Lake
Excellent. Well, we have time for just one more thing. For this episode, that could be a whole separate episode. AI and the future of work as well. So let's let's move on, though, to wrap up. So maybe you could just give us some your take advice words of wisdom on aspiring business students or anybody out there that's listening or watching us on YouTube.
Rodney Lake
You know, what advice would you give people who are studying business now or want to retrain themselves? What would you say to them?
Vanessa Perry
Oh, I would say, you know, definitely watch market news.
Rodney Lake
That's the no.
Vanessa Perry
Brainer. That's right. That's a no brainer. But, these kinds of opportunities to engage with business leaders, to find out what's going on, to stay current are essential. So that's one thing. There's just so much, information available in real time, but you have to make time to be able to absorb it because it's going on outside of the classroom.
Vanessa Perry
It's going on outside of your internships. The other thing I would suggest is, and you may have to schedule this as well, is time to focus on building your network, because that network is one of the most valuable things that GW students have access to. And this is something that is both needs to be intentional and strategic, but this is a network that you'll have throughout your career.
Vanessa Perry
If you are smart about it. And there's nothing wrong with taking time out to spend time with your classmates and engage with our many, many, many, very exciting and very, very active student organizations and, engaging with activities that involve GW, SB alums. There's nothing wrong with spending time on that. It may seem like you're wasting time, but you're absolutely not.
Vanessa Perry
It will pay off.
Rodney Lake
Excellent. Well, I want to thank you for your time, Dean Perry, very much. Thank you.
Vanessa Perry
For having me.
Rodney Lake
That is a wrap for episode 12 for Market News with Rodney Lake. See you on the next episode of Market News with Rodney Lake. See you then.
Rodney Lake
Disclaimer: The content shared by GW Investment Institute podcast is for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be considered investment advice. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the GW Investment Institute or the George Washington University. Listeners should not act upon the information provided without seeking professional advice from a qualified financial advisor.
Rodney Lake
Investing involves risks including the loss of principal. The GW Investment Institute. The George Washington University. And the podcast hosts do not assume any responsibility for any investment decisions made based on the content of this podcast. Always conduct your own research and consult with a financial advisor before making any investment decisions.