Feature Interview: William Ko | UC Berkeley

This week, we interviewed William Ko, President of Business Review at Berkeley (BRB). He told us how BRB’s goal to increase financial literacy and wellness through the articles that the organization publishes on their website. William talks about how he was compelled to join BRB and how it has affected not only himself, but the students around him. To learn more his experiences at BRB, read the whole interview here!

Organization

Business Review at Berkeley (BRB)

Name and Position in Organization

William Ko, President

What is the purpose/mission of your organization?

BRB’s mission is to be the business thought leaders on campus. We like to host speaker events, professional development workshop events, and presentations, but our main outlet is publishing articles, on topics ranging from financial markets, to financial literacy, to non-profits in the area. We also like to give it a little spin with investigative journalism and it helps bring fresh noise to the market.

What does BRB offer the Berkeley students and community?

We have a website where we publish all of our articles, and it’s open to the public: anyone can access it. From the website, you can read from our four columns — investing, financial literacy, economics, and community — and each of those articles has its bottom line, thesis, and message, so you’re learning something new every time.

In terms of financial literacy and wellness?

In terms of financial literacy, it’s one of the core columns within our club, and it’s one of the core ideas that we wish to push forward. A few things that we’re doing right now, besides writing financial literacy articles — last semester we wrote some articles about marginal tax rates, as well as student savings, and someone wrote an article about general financial literacy education and how it’s not being pushed forward early on in a person’s life — we recently hosted an event with a financial literacy company called Flourish. Right now we’re in the midst of partnering with a representative from a hedge fund organization in Palo Alto who’s working with Palo Alto High School to create a curriculum for financial literacy in high schools, and some of our members and executive team will work on creating that curriculum and spreading it in high schools in California.

Why did you decide to join BRB?

When I first came to Cal, I was still trying to find my major, and business seemed to be something interesting, and I wanted to join an organization that taught me business in a different way, but also in a way that I liked. For me it was mainly going about things my own way, trying to do my own research, and have the appropriate cast to support me — and I’m not normally a writer, but I thought this club seemed to reach out to me, and since it had this investigative journalism aspect to it, I thought I could uncover some pretty interesting stories behind it.

How does this investigative journalism apply to the financial literacy column?

I think we like to take a broader approach when it comes to financial literacy. I mean, there are definitely topics within financial literacy that require some sort of investigative journalism. Say for example, marginal tax rates, an entire investigative piece can be done behind it, talking about the shift from progressive tax rates to regressive tax rates — one of the Berkeley Haas professors, Terrance Odean, he mentioned a few of his coworkers who have done work basically finding that America can push the highest income tax bracket up to 90 percent and they’d still keep the top 1 percent working, but that would also general huge amounts of tax revenue. And I think it’s especially relevant now, with candidates like Elizabeth Warren coming in, trying to figure out how to fix health care for all, there’s got to be some kind of government tax revenue.

So there is an investigative aspect to financial literacy, but I think we like to take, again, a broader approach and that’s one of the things that we think is very important, so more straightforward things like, we have some articles about access to financial literacy resources on campus — some of our articles mention FLEJCON (Financial Literacy and Economic Justice Conference), some of them mention Bears For Financial Success, things like that.

What kind of impact has BRB created thus far, generally and in terms of financial literacy?

It’s difficult to quantify that, but our viewership has gone up, some articles even get 1,500 views, and most of our readers are either on campus here, in the Berkeley area, or even in the Bay Area.

In terms of financial literacy, I believe our events have set a precedent about our club. I think people know what we’re here for and they appreciate the type of articles we push out. It’s hard to say our direct impact on people, but I think we’re doing a good job.

What are your goals for BRB’s continued and future impact, generally and in terms of financial literacy?

For BRB specifically, the main goal would be on two fronts — from the readership viewpoint, to increase the number of readership so we can get those lessons out to as many people as possible. I think expansion-wise, that helps us with partnering with larger organizations, and we can do more of these collaborations, for example with FLEJCON, or with the Palo Alto High School. But from an internal perspective as well, we’d like to host more workshops about whatever topics those can be; we do host our weekly town halls and within the weekly town halls there’s always some sort of lesson behind it about financial literacy or economics that’s brought up by one of the members. So I think pushing more internal events as well and teaching everyone in the club to be an educated, financially literate person when they leave.

To learn more about Business Review at Berkeley:

Website: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~businessreview/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/businessreviewatberkeley/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/businessreviewatberkeley/

Instagram: @businessreviewberkeley

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