Finance With a Slice of Argentina

Finance students have a place to go to practice their skills and test ideas at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Study groups huddle in the faculty office of M. Cecilia Bustamante, winner of the 2018 Allen J. Krowe Award for Teaching Excellence.

Some students sit on a sofa facing Bustamante’s desk, while others work on a large whiteboard filled with graphs and equations.

“These are formulas to compute discount rates in valuation,” Bustmante explains, pointing to one corner of the whiteboard. In another section, she shows where students have practiced calculating corporate leverage.

“This is why I have this couch,” Bustamante says. “I have a lot of students packed in here, so I thought they might as well be comfortable.”

Bustamante comes from a long line of teachers in Argentina, where she learned English, Italian and basic French — in addition to her native Spanish. “My great-grandmother was a school director. My granddad was a math professor. My mom teaches English,” she says. “There is this gene in me.”

She says the couch reflects her Argentinian approach to education. “I want students to know that I am approachable,” she says. “There is no glass wall between them and me. I think that’s very Latin.”

Despite growing up in Argentina and doing her undergraduate work in Buenos Aires, Bustamante started her teaching career in Europe. She earned a master’s degree in Spain, a PhD in Switzerland and then joined the faculty at the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom.

When she came to Maryland Smith in 2014, she faced an adjustment period as she acclimated to the U.S. education system. “It was a mutual struggle for me and my students,” she says. “But over time I got the hang of it.”

For evidence Bustamante points to the Krowe award, the highest teaching honor given at Smith. “What this shows is that I managed to persuade people that finance can be cool,” she says.

In addition to the teaching award, Bustamante has earned recognition as a researcher. Her papers have been published in the world’s top finance journals, and in 2017 she was one of six finance scholars chosen to speak at the first conference organized by the Association of Female Academics in Finance, a subsidiary of the American Finance Association.

Bustamante says working with finance students keeps her sharp as a researcher. “You understand things deeply when you learn to explain them simply,” she says.

Growing up, Bustamante did not see herself following the family path into education. She dreamed of being an astronaut, a ballet dancer or maybe a writer like Argentinian novelist Julio Cortázar.

In the end she earned an undergraduate degree in economics and went to work as a consultant. But a passion for learning pulled her back to school, and she chose finance because she wanted a field of study relatively free of political influence.

“I didn’t want people to tell me what to think,” says Bustamante, who likes to challenge current knowledge as a researcher. “If we were to report things that people already know, there would be no value.”

Moving to Spain was an easy adjustment, she says, because of the cultural similarities to Argentina. Moving to Switzerland was another matter.

“I learned a lot about myself by living abroad in such a diverse country,” she says. “Back home, you can travel five hours, and people are still speaking Spanish and talking about the same political problems.”

Following her PhD program, which included a visiting scholar appointment at the University of California-Berkeley, Bustamante has expanded her global footprint at academic conferences and other events all over the world.

“I used to travel to see places,” she says. “Now it’s much more about seeing friends. I have friends spread out in different places.”

In her free time Bustamante enjoys modern art, literature and swimming. “I’m not extremely fast,” she says. “But I can swim for hours.”

Bustamante is also interested in social impact, which is the main thing she likes about teaching. “There is value in what we do,” she says. “We can actually change the way students see the world.”