The Center for Academic Success & Engagement (CASE) is the academic support hub at the Stamford campus. It supports students’ academic success by offering tutoring, workshops, and personalized services to help them thrive and provides resources and tools to help students develop skills to grow both academically and personally.

On October 8, 2026, Professor Smirnova from the Economics Department conducted the workshop in Personal Finance. She started by saying that each of us is a CFO (Chief Financial Officer) of our own life, and so we need to develop strong knowledge and competent skills to make sound financial decisions for ourselves.

Since it was the second instalment of the Financial Literacy workshop at CASE, the agenda for this workshop blended together revisiting the concepts such as the interest rate and the time value of money and bringing forward new concepts of the power of interest compounding, debt and debt management, and the FICO credit score.

Students in attendance were able to ask questions and check their understanding of the use of credit cards and the strategies of obtaining their credit reports.

Dr. Smirnova is passionate about disseminating knowledge about financial concepts to her students inside and outside of the classroom. She is part of the followers of the Stanford University Initiative for Financial Decision Making (IFDM) and recently attended the Stanford University Conference on Teaching Personal Finance where she obtained new instructional materials, some of which were used at the CASE event.

The financial literacy programming at the Center for Academic Success & Engagement (CASE) at the Stamford campus is very important. Our students make decisions about loans for college tuition and cars, along with managing credit cards, health and other kinds of insurance, and living within a budget. In the future, they must be able to navigate a multifaceted financial landscape facing complex financial decisions with potentially long-lasting consequences at all stages of life. Therefore, our students must become intelligent and disciplined managers of their personal finances. We thank CASE for making strides in achieving this goal.