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Using Data in Financial Decision-Making

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Using Data in Financial Decision-Making

Earn a Master of Business Analytics from Russia’s #1 university

“Finance… is about human relations, which is another thing that cannot be digitalized or automated. Professionals with deep theoretical knowledge, technical skills, the ability to think critically, and build long-term human relations are the people of the future.“ 

— Sergey Balakirev, Head of Development Projects at Promsvyazbank PJSC

In September, the new HSE University master’s program in Business Analytics launched on Coursera. This new, 100% online program provides students opportunities to enjoy practical, hands-on learning in interactive environments—similar to applied learning content in HSE’s on-site master’s program in Corporate Finance, where graduates have pursued careers in business, retail, banking, and finance, as well as created their own start-ups.

To provide more information about the benefits of HSE’s master’s programs in light of HSE’s newest Business Analytics program launch, we spoke with HSE’s on-site master’s program Corporate Finance graduates Sergey Balakirev, Head of Development Projects at Promsvyazbank PJSC, and Georgy Pashchenko, Chief Financial Officer at Kodland, an EdTech startup.

Why did you choose the HSE Corporate Finance programme?

Sergey Balakirev:

For me, the choice of a master’s program was quite simple, as I had several key criteria. I was looking for a program that was as practice-oriented as possible—where the teachers in the program are corporate finance and market professionals with significant experience. I also wanted the opportunity to combine work and studies—as other high-quality programs don’t necessarily offer the opportunity to do that today. HSE University’s reputation among professionals and employers was another factor. Looking back, I view the decision to join the program as one of the best I’ve ever made.

Georgy Pashchenko:

According to experienced corporate finance professionals, this program provides an optimal balance of practical and theoretical skills. Together with the evening-class format, which can be combined with work in the field, this creates a strong synergy; it allows you to rise to a completely new professional level in two years and benefit from corresponding acceleration in career growth. I had a background in IT, so while working in finance, I wanted to fill the gaps in my knowledge and get a fundamental understanding of corporate finance.

How relevant are the studies to current requirements in the corporate finance and business analysis markets? What tracks are adapted to meet these requirements?

Sergey Balakirev:

The program is practice-oriented, and its teachers include professionals who are trendsetters in corporate finance and apply exactly what they teach to their own careers. Most of the program tracks are designed like this. Courses in business valuation, financial modeling, financial reporting, venture capital, and mergers and acquisitions are particularly relevant to the corporate finance and business analysis markets.

Georgy Pashchenko:

The program’s teachers are not only renowned theoreticians, but practitioners from leading companies in their fields. Students gain relevant knowledge, plus highly sought-after skills. This helps them to become professionals capable of handling the most complicated projects.

What theoretical and practical classes would you like to mention?

Sergey Balakirev:

Despite the fact that the program is practice-oriented, it provides a serious theoretical foundation with detailed analysis of academic publications in corporate finance, macroeconomics, and econometrics. These classes provide a fundamental knowledge and train you to reason from first principles, which is a considerable advantage in the market. I would particularly like to mention the research seminar format, where participants virtually become researchers and learn how scholars identify trends, factors, and specific drivers of different solutions and their interrelations. Based on my own post-program story, this is a useful skill that reinforces a broad outlook and a complex perspective of the events that happen in corporate solutions.

Georgy Pashchenko:

First of all, I remember the impactful theoretical courses on business value: valuation, corporate finance, elements of value-based management. Among the practical classes, I would highlight project financing. Most of the courses are generally very strong, and the large amount of team project work also helped to refine our soft skills.

What global trends in business analytics can you highlight?

Sergey Balakirev:

The key global trend in financial and business analytics is the application of various software tools in addition to Excel. Today, professionals often need to know programming languages to work with data arrays and raw data in order to look for signals—including weak and unlikely ones—for use in financial decision-making.

Georgy Pashchenko:

Analysis is becoming more conceptually and methodologically complicated. It’s no longer possible to build a career with simple Excel calculations. Professionals need to have a strong theoretical foundation that allows them to build and interpret bold and complicated models. A new level of technical skill is also essential, namely in programming languages and interactive data visualization tools. Analysts of the future must be bold methodologists capable of processing huge amounts of data to find ideas to help their business increase profits.

What is required of finance professionals and business analysts today?

Sergey Balakirev:

Finance is an extremely competitive environment with competitive requirements. You must be knowledgeable in theoretical finance and business analysis, be familiar with analytical tools, have skills working with large volumes of information and identifying important points from this information, and be able to formulate your thoughts clearly. The scope of finance professionals’ operations is expanding: more and more often, there is a need to analyze data that is non-financial, to search for relations between this data and financial estimates and indicators. Professionals must find ways to include such data in financial models.

Georgy Pashchenko:

First of all, I recommend loving what you do, and to keep improving, learning, and communicating with leading experts. In terms of key skills, I would emphasize soft skills such as creativity, curiosity, and boldness in research. And only then will I go on to the standard set of hard skills: finance theory, financial modeling, analysis tools (spreadsheet editors, programming languages, and BI solutions).

How has your career developed? How would you like to advance professionally?

Sergey Balakirev:

I started my career when I was still studying in the HSE master’s program. My first employer was a Big Four company, where I had a three-month internship in the financial institution audit department. Then, still as a student, I worked in the corporate finance department of a Russian consulting company for six months and then became a business valuation consultant at PwC. I worked there for 18 months and gained invaluable experience and skills that I still find helpful. After that, I shifted my career towards investment and worked for 3.5 years at the family office of a top-100 Forbes billionaire. I spent 1.5 years of that dealing with venture investment, growing from an investment analyst to vice president for investment. I still work in investment today, but for the last two years it’s been in banking: I help implement an ecosystem and digital transformation strategy via M&A and venture investment. I spent 1.5 years at VTB Bank in the strategic department as managing director, and have spent the last six months at Promsvyazbank, also in the strategic department as head of development projects. 

If I change jobs in the future, I would like to continue developing in the field of investment in tech companies.

Georgy Pashchenko:

When I was a fourth-year undergraduate student at the HSE Faculty of Business Informatics, I had an internship with KPMG in the investment and capital market department of the corporate finance group. I was fascinated by financial modeling, which let me fully apply the synergy of my technical education and interest in finance. Thanks in no small part to my education in the master’s program in Corporate Finance, I was able to supervise teams on very complicated projects in financial modeling, valuation, and project feasibility studies soon after the start of my career. Alongside financial projects, I built a separate digital team from scratch consisting of full-stack developers and data scientists as part of the KPMG investment and capital market department. We were looking for and applying cutting-edge technologies to improve classical investment analysis. After 5.5 years at KPMG, I moved to Kodland, an EdTech company, to serve as CFO. I was inspired by the goal to build a global financial team (Kodland operates in a dozen countries and is actively entering new markets) at a company whose mission is to teach digital skills to kids and help them to fulfill their dreams.

What do you expect business analysis to look like in 10 or 20 years? Will the financial profession remain in demand in the long term?

Sergey Balakirev:

The requirements for precision and speed will grow, as will the volume of information processed by analysts in decision making. It will be hard to imagine a finance professional without at least basic programming skills. Big data will not just be a fancy word, but a specific object of analysis, while artificial intelligence and machine learning tools will become basic tools for business analysts and finance experts.

Professions that require expert opinions and creative approaches will also be in demand. These things can’t be automated. Develop your skills in critical thinking and first-principles thinking. Finance—particularly in venture capital markets—is about human relations, which is another thing that cannot be digitalized or automated. Professionals with deep theoretical knowledge, technical skills, the ability to think critically and creatively, and build long-term human relations are the people of the future. They will always be in demand.

Georgy Pashchenko:

The finance profession will always be in demand since it is about concepts and models. Technical tools for implementing models will change a lot, as will the volume of data and the quality of indicator visualization. But experts who can develop analysis methodologies, build models, interpret the results, and provide comprehensive recommendations for businesses will always be sought after.

See how Adrienne combines skills learned as a stay-at-home mom with new skills gained with a Google Professional Certificate to succeed in her dream job

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See how Adrienne combines skills learned as a stay-at-home mom with new skills gained with a Google Professional Certificate to succeed in her dream job

Meet Adrienne! She’s on an amazing career journey that started with an important decision—after ten years as a stay-at-home mom, she decided she was ready to return to the workforce. There were some obstacles along the way, but she kept her sights on a career in project management, and she’s recently landed a new job. She shares her story below, including some insights into how she enhanced her resume with the Google Project Management: Professional Certificate and successfully prepared for her job interviews, and how her transferable skills helped her move into a new field.

Hi, my name is Adrienne. I had a surprise pregnancy while in college and decided to leave school to become a mom. What was supposed to be a year of motherhood turned into being a stay-at-home mom for over ten years! Early this year, I decided it was time for me to get back into the workforce. However, I felt far behind my peers, mainly because I didn’t even have a college degree. 

I enrolled in the Google Project Management: Professional Certificate program when it launched in March with the intention of getting into the field of my dreams—technology. Once I started the program, I was happy to realize that the volunteer work I had done in our school district had actually taught me some skills I could incorporate into my future career as a project manager. 

I got so excited while earning my certificate that I began applying to new jobs mid-course. I was offered a role at a name-brand luxury resort as a full-time event planner, which I accepted. But, I was still determined to reach my dream job as a project manager in technology!

I spent my days off finishing the Google Professional Certificate program (while juggling being a mom!). It was challenging, but having a long day at work only pushed me harder to finish my program and earn my certificate. The program helped me build a portfolio to present to potential employers and it even taught me how to build my resume and prepare for job interviews. The program was engaging, fun, and I am completely confident in my new skills.

Today, I am proud to announce that I am working in a job at a top technology company. 

Earning my Google Project Management: Professional Certificate is one of the biggest accomplishments I’ve made in my education, and it was a key stepping stone to my new career.

Coursera partners with the California State Library to launch free statewide job training program 

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Coursera partners with the California State Library to launch free statewide job training program 

By Kevin Mills, Head of Government Partnerships 

While vaccination rates climb and schools and businesses slowly open back up, unemployment rates remain a challenge, even in the largest economies. California has the highest GDP of any U.S. state, yet the technology epicenter is also tied for the highest unemployment rate in the country at 7.5%. The scale of this challenge requires innovative solutions to reach displaced workers and enhance the state’s wider recovery efforts. 

Among the institutions leading the way is the California State Library, which has granted $4.36M in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to expand workforce development efforts. As part of this initiative, the State Library and its grant recipient, Pacific Library Partnership (PLP), are partnering with Coursera to launch a free statewide job training program that will prepare thousands of learners with digital skills and credentials needed to re-enter the workforce, unlock new job opportunities, and advance their careers.

Residents can visit their local public library in-person or online to access Coursera training for free the same way they would check out a digital book, only they earn a certificate for each course or program they complete. Through over 1,000 California-based libraries, learners will have access to over 5,000 job-relevant online courses, taught by leading university and industry educators including UC San Diego, UC Irvine, Amazon, and Microsoft in areas like business, technology, and data science. 

The State Library-PLP-Coursera initiative also includes access to 15 entry-level Professional Certificate programs from industry partners like Google, IBM, Salesforce, and Facebook. These certificate programs are designed to prepare workers without a college degree or technical experience for entry-level digital jobs in high-growth fields such as IT Support, cybersecurity, sales development, and marketing analytics. Several entry-level certificates from Google and IBM have received ACE credit recommendations, opening up flexible pathways to degree programs. 

The training program includes additional education providers and is one part of a four-part $10.5M ARPA pandemic recovery effort the State Library is introducing throughout 2022. To realize the full potential of their digital inclusion efforts, the State Library will also offer programs that support residents in everything from internet connectivity and device access at-home to technical support for seniors. 

Public libraries have long been a critical social infrastructure, providing local communities access to knowledge, connectivity, and employment resources for free. The pandemic makes their mission more urgent, and we’re proud to support forward-thinking institutions like the State Library as they take on a greater role in unifying key support initiatives and enabling access to critical resources for learners across the state. 

We are proud to welcome the California State Library to a growing number of U.S. state and local government and public sector institutions partnering with Coursera to retrain displaced workers for the jobs of tomorrow, including New York, Tennessee, Missouri, and the city of Chicago. 

To sign up for the program, visit the California State Library website. For more information about Coursera for Government, visit coursera.org/government. 

The Best Holiday Gifts For Your Dev Team

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The Best Holiday Gifts For Your Dev Team
The Best Holiday Gifts For Your Dev Team

It’s that time of the year again. With holidays and Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals just around the corner, there’s no better time to show your appreciation for your dev teams. But how do you know what to pick? What gifts will developers truly enjoy?

To make your holiday shopping easier, we reached out to the developers in the Codecademy community and asked for their opinions on the perfect gift for a fellow dev. Here’s what they shared.

1. Noise-canceling headphones

When you’re poring over lines of code, the last thing you want is to be pulled out of the zone. Help your teams stay focused with a quality pair of Bluetooth, noise-canceling headphones.

2. Mechanical keyboard

Several developers suggested mechanical keyboards (and mouses) as the perfect gift — and for good reason. Mechanical keyboards have a few benefits that give them an edge over traditional keyboards, including greater customizability and functionality.

They’re also more accurate — which makes for better coding — and they’re more reliable, lasting anywhere from six to 20 times longer than traditional keyboards.

3. Standing desk converter

Standing desk converters are excellent gifts because they’re something that people don’t know they need until they have it. Healthline reports that standing desks can help reduce chronic pain, and they can also help improve mood and productivity. And you don’t have to invest in a pricey mechanical overhaul of your team’s set-up — there are plenty of great manual options that sit atop existing desks, which tend to be more affordable.

4. Monitor arms

Like standing desk converters, monitor arms are another great way to show your team you have their best interests at heart. Monitor arms allow you to easily adjust the height and placement of your monitor, reducing eye and muscle strain, improving posture, and helping to reduce desk clutter. Some even come with stands and laptop trays, if you’re in the market for something a bit fancier and more customizable.

5. Fingerless gloves

Believe it or not, fingerless gloves are a nifty gift for any techy. Typing (and coding) is much more difficult when your hands start to stiffen up in the cold, and fingerless gloves will help your teams type and touch screens when they’re on the go. Plus, compression gloves can also help alleviate the joint pain and inflammation common to anyone who spends hours typing away at a computer.

6. Codecademy Pro

Programmers on our forums, Facebook, and Twitter all volunteered Pro memberships as the perfect gift for developers. Technology is constantly evolving, and Pro is a great way to help your dev teams keep their skills sharp. And now, with Codecademy Teams and Teams+, you can gift Codecademy Pro to your whole team!

Teams and Teams+ allow you to take a more hands-on approach to training — facilitating your team’s growth and development, inspiring motivation and engagement with company goals, and creating greater value for your teams and company as a whole. In other words, Teams is a gift that keeps on giving.

Ready to get started with Teams? Check out the Codecademy for Business page and reach out to our sales team.

For Business Courses & Tutorials | Codecademy

From software development to data analysis—give your team the latest technical skills to tackle any business problem.

Get Ready To Ace Your Technical Interviews With Code Challenges

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Get Ready To Ace Your Technical Interviews With Code Challenges
Get Ready To Ace Your Technical Interviews With Code Challenges

How do you know when your coding skills are good enough to land a job?

You might feel ready after building a website or two. Or, you might have a solid portfolio, fleshed out with various Challenge and Portfolio Projects, and still wonder if it’s enough. Gauging your own capabilities can be hard — especially when you’re learning on your own. That’s why we’re launching Code Challenges, so you can prepare for your technical interviews and see if you’re ready right here on Codecademy.

Technical interviews test how well you can tackle complex coding problems and utilize the tools you’ll use on the job. They might be one of the biggest challenges you’ll face on the road to your new career, so you’ll want to be well-prepared when you walk into your first one.

Code Challenges are real technical interview questions pulled from some of the top companies in tech. Not only will they help you see if you’re job-ready, but they’ll also show you what steps you need to take to get there.

Each Code Challenge highlights the programming concepts tested within — and they’ll also show you which courses you can take if you need to brush up on your skills. Plus, after practicing with real technical interview questions, you’ll be ready to put your best foot forward when the time comes for your interviews.

Like with real technical interviews, there’s no single right answer with Code Challenges. Instead, they really test your coding knowledge and ability to think like a programmer. That means you’ll want to focus not only on finding a solution but also on the efficiency of your code and your ability to explain what each part does.

You can take Code Challenges as many times as you’d like, so don’t worry about getting it right on the first try. Then, once you pass, you can share your solution in our forums to get tips from other developers on how to further improve your code.

Need a more visual explanation? On Wednesday, November 17th, Alex Kuntz, Codecademy’s Curriculum Manager, will show you how to use Code Challenges to prepare for technical interviews in a live tutorial. Or, if you’d rather check it out yourself, head to our Code Challenges page and get started.

Code Challenges are a great way to prepare for technical interviews, but remember — technical interviews are only part of the process. To get your foot in the door, you’ll still need a polished resume and portfolio and a skill set that’s up to par. For more tips on preparing for a career in tech, check out our Career Center.

Annotated by the Author: ‘Review of “Dune”: A Hero in the Making, on Shifting Sands’

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Annotated by the Author: ‘Review of “Dune”: A Hero in the Making, on Shifting Sands’

That impulse to linger is understandable given the monumentality of Villeneuve’s world building (and its price tag). But the movie’s spectacular scale combined with Herbert’s complex mythmaking also creates a not entirely productive tension between stasis and movement. Not long after he lands on Dune, Paul is ushered into the new world of its tribal people, the Fremen, a transitional passage leading from dark rooms to bright desert, from heavy machinery and vaulted spaces with friezes to gauzy robes and the meringue peaks of the dunes. Paul is on a journey filled with heavy deeds and thoughts, but en route he can seem caught in all this beauty, like a fly in fast-hardening sap.

There are moments in “Dune” and in Villeneuve’s other movies when his truer talent is for production design rather than as a director of moving pictures.

Chalamet looks young enough for the role (Paul is 15 when the novel opens) and can certainly strike a Byronic pose, complete with black coat and anguished hair. The actor has his moments in “Dune,” including in an early scene with Rampling’s Reverend Mother, who puts Paul through a painful test; Chalamet excels at imparting a sense of confused woundedness, psychic and physical. But he doesn’t move with the coiled grace of the warrior that Paul is meant to be, which undermines both his training sessions with the family “warmaster” (Josh Brolin) and in his later role as a messianic figure, one who is considerably less complicated and conflicted onscreen than he is on the page.

As I was thinking about Timothée Chalamet’s acting, I realized that he has effectively become the new Leonardo DiCaprio, a.k.a. Hollywood’s latest bankable white male heartthrob. That means that, like the young DiCaprio, Chalamet is now famous enough to be cast in a big movie whether he makes sense in it or not. I didn’t have the space or inclination to drag DiCaprio into this graph — but that’s what I was thinking.

Written by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, the screenplay has taken predictable liberties. The movie retains the overall arc of the book despite having jettisoned characters and swaths of plot. There have been felicitous changes, as with the character Dr. Liet Kynes, an ecologist who’s a man in the book but is now a woman. Played by a formidably striking Sharon Duncan-Brewster, the character doesn’t receive nearly enough screen time, particularly given Kynes’s weighty patrimony and narrative function. But Duncan-Brewster — like so many of the other well-cast supporting performers — makes enough of an impression that she helps fill in the script’s ellipses.

Dr. Liet Kynes is a great character; in the book, he is also a man. I love that the movie makes the character a woman, even if one who’s been whittled down in importance. But Sharon Duncan-Brewster is one of those actors who, through their talent and presence, can make even a smallish role seem big. She’s terrific. And, of course, her casting adds some gender and racial diversity. I would love to see an entire movie or series centered on her as Liet Kynes.

Throughout “Dune,” you can feel Villeneuve caught and sometimes struggling between his fidelity to the source material and the demands of big-ticket mainstream moviemaking and selling. It’s easy to imagine that he owns several copies of the novel, each copiously dog-eared and heavily outlined. (The movie is relatively free of holiday-ready merch opportunities, outside of a cute desert mouse with saucer-sized ears.) At the same time, Villeneuve is making a movie in a Marvel-dominated industry that foregrounds obviousness and blunt action sequences over ambiguity and introspection. There’s talk and stillness here, true, but also plenty of fights, explosions and hardware.

The fact that Villeneuve directed a sober, serious and beautiful movie from a sober, serious and smart book at this point in American mainstream movie history is impressive enough to mention and celebrate. Whatever you think of Marvel, its crushing domination is terrible for the movie industry simply because it has led to less and less narrative and genre diversity in bigger movies. It’s bleak.

The trickiest challenge is presented by the movie’s commercial imperatives and, by extension, the entire historical thrust of Hollywood with its demand for heroes and happy endings. This presents a problem that Villeneuve can’t or won’t solve. Paul is burdened by prophetic visions he doesn’t yet fully understand, and while he’s an appealing figure in the novel, he is also menacing. Herbert was interested in problematizing the figure of the classic champion, including the superhero, and he weaves his critique into the very fabric of his multilayered tale. “No more terrible disaster could befall your people,” a character warns, “than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”

Frank Herbert, the author of the original novel, complicates Paul’s role in interesting ways that are fundamentally anathema to Hollywood’s frustrating, often maddeningly simplistic love for unambiguous heroes. Villeneuve’s conception of the character isn’t as complex as Herbert’s, and his Paul is more classically heroic or at least seems like the usual hero-in-the-making. But the movie only adapts the first half of the first book, so maybe — if Villeneuve directs a sequel — he will go against Hollywood’s heroic grain. Here’s hoping.

Self-Compassion

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Self-Compassion

Do you often judge yourself harshly? Treat yourself worse than you treat others? Or, are you generally kind to yourself?

According to a Times article, “Today’s teenagers are plagued by more distress than any generation on record,” but being compassionate to yourself — by doing things like noticing your feelings without judgment, and by realizing you’re not alone — can help.

What can you do to be kinder to yourself?

Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more.

Want more Picture Prompts? Find them all in this column.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Word of the Day: burnish

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Word of the Day: burnish

verb: polish and make shiny

verb: bring to a highly developed, finished or refined state

noun: the property of being smooth and shiny

_________

The word burnish has appeared in 109 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on May 1 in “Bill Nye Is Still Having Fun With Science” by Alyson Krueger:

For Mr. Brainard, it was also a matter of credibility. “It was during this time when nobody knew what was happening so they turned to the people they trusted, and for us, that was Bill Nye,” he said. “I will do anything Bill Nye tells me to do.”

That sense of trust has also prompted numerous brands to approach Mr. Nye to become their spokesman, especially brands that want to burnish their commitment to the sciences and climate change in particular.

“Bill is a world-renowned science educator and environmental advocate, and we are partnering with him to spread awareness,” said Dani Reiss, the president of Canada Goose, the outdoor apparel company, which hired Mr. Nye in April to be a sustainability adviser.

Can you correctly use the word burnish in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.

If you want a better idea of how burnish can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.

If you enjoy this daily challenge, try one of our monthly vocabulary challenges.

Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.

Harry Potter

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Harry Potter

The movie “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was released 20 years ago this month. Have you seen it? Are you a “Harry Potter” fan in general? If so, how have these books and/or films shaped you? What role have they played in your life?

Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more about the film and how it was made.

Want more Picture Prompts? Find them all in this column.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

What’s Your Favorite Local Business?

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What’s Your Favorite Local Business?

Look at the photo above. What elements draw your attention? Have you been in stores that remind you of this one?

What are your favorite local stores, restaurants or other kinds of services? To answer, consider businesses that are unique to your neighborhood or city — not stores like Target that can be found everywhere.

In “Casa Magazines Has Seen It All,” Kate Dwyer writes about the store pictured above, which sells newspapers and magazines. It opened in 1994 in the West Village of Manhattan, and remains “a pillar of the neighborhood.” The article describes some of the relationships that have developed there between the staff and customers:

On Saturday and Sunday mornings, nearby residents gather at the store for their morning paper and a coffee from La Bonbonniere, the cash-only diner down the block. “If I didn’t show up, they would call me and be like, ‘Where are you?’” said Alison Benson, a television producer who keeps a spare set of keys at Casa.

Twenty years ago, when she was starting her career, she said, “I would go into the shop, and they would be like, ‘Oh, this is Alison, she’s working in TV and film. Alison, you should meet Sheila, she’s a big producer.’ They were like the ultimate connectors on all things.” (Now, Mr. Ahmed and his assistant manager, Syed Khalid Wasim, known as Ali, refer 20-somethings to Ms. Benson.)

Ms. David attested to the familiarity between the shop’s managers and its patrons. “It’s like a confessional box,” she said. “I’ve seen people tell Mohammed all these secrets. The secrets of the Village!”

Luis Lopez, a driver on the M12 bus route, which starts outside the store, often pals around with Mr. Wasim between loops. “We do skits all the time,” Mr. Lopez said.

“It feels like a grown-up Sesame Street,” said Nicolas Heller, a documentarian who shares stories about the city on his Instagram account @newyorknico.

William Grand, a D.J. who manufactures Casa’s merchandise through his company Neighborhood Spot, described Mr. Ahmed using a laser pointer to help shoppers navigate the inventory from his perch behind the counter. “They have over 2,000 titles, but he knows exactly where stuff is,” he said.

Julianne Moore would bring her children to browse every week while they were growing up. “Ali in particular was always giving my kids candy,” the Oscar-winning actress said, adding that the managers “always remember you.”

“Also,” Ms. Moore noted, “as an actor, if you end up on the cover of something and you’re a local, they’ll put 15 of those magazines in the window. It’s really sweet.”

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

  • Would you want to visit Casa Magazines? Does it remind you of any store or other kind of business you have been in? Why?

  • Are you a “regular” at any businesses in your area? How often do you go? Do you recognize some of the people who work there? Do they remember you, too?

  • What would you say is your favorite local store, restaurant, coffee shop, or other kind of business? For example, maybe you regularly get your nails done at the same salon, or maybe there’s a bookstore or outdoor gear store you like. What is great about this place?

  • Do you know any stories of customers who supported local shops, restaurants or other businesses during the pandemic, the way customers at Casa Magazines and La Bonbonniere did? Have those businesses survived the pandemic so far?

  • Would you ever want to work at a local store or business? If so, which, and why? Have you ever had a job in retail? What was it like? Did you get to know regular customers?

  • What are the advantages to shopping in small, locally owned businesses instead of in big chains? The disadvantages? Which do you prefer? Why?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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