In this activity, students learn how people prepared for and then dealt during a hurricane by analyzing news headlines about Hurricane Florence (2018). Then they analyze data about the amount of damage that different categories of hurricanes cause, learning that even low category storms are able to cause damage.

Lesson Objective: At the completion of this lesson, students will be able to explain risk management through a combination of avoidance, risk, reduction, retention, and transfer.

The course is designed to provide a better understanding of the built environment, globalization, the current financial crisis and the impact of these factors on the rapidly changing and evolving international architecture, engineering, construction fields.
We will, hopefully, obtain a better understanding of how these forces of globalization and the current financial crisis are having an impact on the built environment and how they will affect firms and your future career opportunities. We will also identify, review and discuss best practices and lessons that can be learned from recent events.
We will explore the “international built environment” in detail, examining how it functions and asking what are the managerial, entrepreneurial and professional opportunities, challenges and risks in it, especially growing crossover and multi-disciplinary opportunities; and we will seek to understand what makes this “built environment” so different from other sectors.

Lecture notes introducing how market expectations are formed and how this applies to financial risk management

Lecture notes detailing data sources that help to analyze market and interest rate risk

This course is a core requirement for the Masters in Engineering program, designed to teach students about the roles of today’s professional engineer and expose them to team-building skills through lectures, team workshops, and seminars. Topics include: written and oral communication, job placement skills, trends in the engineering and construction industry, risk analysis and risk management, managing public information, proposal preparation, project evaluation, project management, liability, professional ethics, and negotiation. The course draws on relevant large-scale projects to illustrate each component of the subject.

Federal credit programs involve a unique set of challenges and opportunities. This practical training course for executive and legislative branch decision-makers and staff is aimed at enhancing the understanding of the core financial principles necessary to most effectively design and run those programs. It brings together institutional analysis, risk management and corporate finance disciplines for the purpose of improving the management of federal credit agency resources.

This is a extensive collection of maps, data, and tools that students can use to research drought and its impacts on agriculture, wildfires, water supply, vegetation, soil moisture, temperature and precipitation.

This is a course in how corporations make use of the insights and tools of risk management. Most courses on derivatives, futures and options, and financial engineering are taught from the viewpoint of investment bankers and traders in the securities. This course is taught from the point of view of the manufacturing corporation, the utility, the software firm—any potential end-user of derivatives, but not the dealer. Most related courses focus on the extensive taxonomy of instruments and the complex models developed to price them, and on ways to exploit mispricing. While this course will make use of some of these pricing models, the focus is on how corporations use the insights and models to improve their operations, to increase the value of their real assets, or to create the financial flexibility necessary to implement their core strategy.

This course covers techniques of financial analysis of investment expenditures as well as the economic and distributive appraisal of those projects. The course gives special consideration to cases in the developing world. Students will engage in a critical analysis of these tools and their role in the political economy of international development. The course will cover topics such as alternative planning strategies for conditions of uncertainty; organizations and project cycle management; the political environment; and interactions of clients and advisers, engineers, planners, policy analysts, and other professionals.
Introductory micro-economics is a pre-requisite for this course.

1.040 Project Management focuses on the management and implementation of construction projects, primarily infrastructure projects. A project refers to a temporary piece of work undertaken to create a unique product or service. Whereas operations are continuous and repeating, projects are finite and have an end date. Projects bring form or function to ideas or need. Some notable projects include the Manhattan Project (developing the first nuclear weapon); the Human Genome Project (mapping the human genome); and the Central Artery Project (Boston’s “Big Dig”). The field of project management deals with the planning, execution, and controlling of projects.
The course is divided into three parts:
Part 1: project finance
Part 2: project evaluation
Part 3: project organization
This course will cover the basic tools, skills, and knowledge necessary to successfully manage a project through its inception, design, planning, construction, and transition phases. There will be several guest lectures discussing current projects, and a construction site visit to MIT’s Media Lab extension.

This is a first course in project management, one in which students will learn the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to be an effective project manager. They will learn how to plan, execute, and monitor a project. The course will cover the latest theories and concepts on scoping, stakeholder management, team leadership, budgeting and contracting, scheduling, quality control and assurance, and risk management. Students will have the option to apply their learning to a real-world project. 

This learning module (Lesson 3 of Unit 7) is part of a course called Project Management Fundamentals and may either be completed individually as a stand-alone topic, or part of a trio of learning modules on risk management, or as part of the course.

This learning module (Lesson 1 of Unit 7) is part of a course called Project Management Fundamentals and may either be completed individually as a stand-alone topic, or part of a trio of learning modules on risk management, or as part of the course.

This learning module (Lesson 2 of Unit 7) is part of a course called Project Management Fundamentals and may either be completed individually as a stand-alone topic, or part of a trio of learning modules on risk management, or as part of the course.

Several factors contributed to the extreme flooding that occurred in Boulder, Colorado in 2013. In this data activity, students explore and visualize the data for stream discharge data collected by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).