As the 2023-24 cohort of the Global Financial Journalism MA starts a new academic year at City, University of London, Eleanor Florence, one of this year’s students, writes about the first week of the course:

The welcome week for the Global Financial Journalism MA students at City was just as exciting, albeit also as overwhelming, as I imagined it would be!

I think the highlight so far for my classmates and I was the walking tour of the City of London. As a born and bred Londoner and one that walks through this area of London nearly every day, amazingly (if perhaps also embarrassingly…) I can say that everything the tour guide discussed was completely new to me.  

One of the best things about London is that nothing is placed anywhere by accident, and that tour really proved this. For example, I have walked past a rather innocent looking outline of a bird depicted on one of the pubs in Leadenhall Market dozens of times. But thanks to that tour, I am very proud to say that I finally know the story behind it – it turns out the image was put there in honour of a goose that was brought to the market to sell hundreds of years ago, but somehow managed to escape.

Though this niche goose lore was definitely a highlight, it was also amazing to hear the professional stories and backgrounds of the university’s journalism staff. It’s incredibly exciting to hear that they all came from different degrees, backgrounds, and interests, yet all have established very unique and successful careers in the sphere of financial journalism. It’s also very comforting – in our discussions, it was quite obvious that myself and many of the budding journalists in the class have this rather absurd expectation that we have to be world-class journalists within a few months, when in reality, as the faculty’s opinions and backgrounds proved to us, it’s a skill that you develop over a lifetime. I cannot wait to see where their teaching and the course in general takes me and my peers (…well, besides New York and Southern Asia).

Some pictures from the walking tour of the City of London during welcome week: