Petar Katavic e-Portfolio

Welcome and thank you for visiting my e-Portfolio!

Here I will guide you through some stages of my education, successes and history of my life.

Currently I’m a student at BCIT Financial Management program so this e-portfolio is going to show some of the assignments I worked on over the past year at BCIT.
BCIT is the first step towards my career goal, which is to work in a mutual fund industry and eventually manage one.

If you are interested in contacting me, please click on my Contact page and fill in the form and I will contact you back as soon as possible.

Thank you,
Petar Katavic
http://zenportfolios.com/petarkatavic/

The second year of my financial management diploma is almost over!
I still can’t believe it. The time surely did go fast.
This year was definitely an exciting one. I enrolled in the BCIT Peak Leadership program which was a great experience.
The Peak Leadership program is a program at BCIT for all students that want to improve their leadership skills while meeting new and exciting people from all over the campus. During the year every students need to complete a goal setting activity, volunteer 15 hours and attend at least 3 events in order to be eligible to complete the program. The workshops are extremely valuable since you can talk to many professionals and learn all of their experiences as a leader in the business community. We had some great speakers this year, leaders that proven themselves in the real world. People we can really admire by the success they showed.
As a student you don’t have many chances to meet people like that and this opportunity is definitely one of those one you shouldn’t pass. Go and get involved in the program, you will not regret it!

At the end of my first year at BCIT I took an opportunity to lead my set in one of our classes, Financial reports. I successfully manage a set of 30 students for our BCIT Financial Reporting class. The class was designed so that 2 set managers are coordinating all of the work in each set and do proper evaluation of student work. The instructor relied completely on the set manager’s help in the organization and development of the course.
The job seemed easy at the beginning but soon after I realized managing all kinds of different people can be a difficult task. I was in charge of discipline resolution, complains and course structure which wasn’t as easy as it looks. However, I did manage to finish the program and with hard work and student support I manage to successfully bring all of my students towards the end with excellent result. Team work was really a big part of my strategy and at the end it all worked out.

For many years before starting at BCIT I had an interest for business and I strived to learn as much as possible about it. Since my dad was a CEO of a small textile company (800 employees) back home I was introduced to the business world early in life. Through many years my dad taught me the core rules and laws of business and finance. He taught me how to recognize the right moment for any business decision and how to react on it. The main lesson was, to be patient, and that is exactly what I did. I’m still trying to learn as much as possible by reading finance book and all the literature I can find on this topic. There are many things to learn in business/finance and I’m aware nobody can learn it all, but I will try to maximize my chances and learn as much as I can. This became my hobby and my goal, something that keeps me motivated from day to day. That is why I enjoy BCIT and the knowledge I’m getting from it.

Five months ago I attended the Career Planning Program (CPP) at Landell and Associates Consulting Ltd. This seven day program it’s a great start for anyone who finds themselves confused with all the different career paths in today’s working environment. If you want to find out if your personality and/or abilities are supporting your career of choice this is a great choice. You will learn much about yourself and more important, you will gain knowledge of which career would suit you the best. For example, I learned that Finance industry suits me the most. This just affirmed my previews opinion. I was always good with numbers and through my education I won many Math championships and contests so I was always inspired to take a business course but I never did. This program definitely helped me in my decision. The program was great and I met many interesting and good people, the Landell staff was great as well.
There are just good thinks I can say about them.
Thank you Landell!

If you have any interest in this type of program, please the Landell web site.

For the last 10 years and before starting studies at BCIT I worked in the Casino industry all around the world. In 1999 I started as a Casino Dealer in Croatia, working for Casino Mulino. At the beginning I learned how to deal French Roulette and Black jack but soon after I developed new skills and learned new games as well. After 4 years in the casino industry and some savings I decided to enter in to the business world. I opened a movie shop/rental in my hometown (Umag-Croatia). As the beginning of any new entrepreneurship can be challenging and hard I had to find a new source of income. I got a job with Carnival corporation cruise line where I worked as a casino dealer as well. The cruise ship was travelling through different parts of the world (Caribbean, Alaska, Hawaii…) and the hard work was paid off by newly acquired experience and skills. After the cruise ship contract was over I returned home (Croatia) and got my job back (at the local casino). At this point I made a decision to move to Canada and there for I sold my business. After arriving in Vancouver (2005) I found a job at Edgewater Casino where I stayed until March 22, 2009. During these 4 years at Edgewater Casino I was introduced to different parts of the job. I transfer departments, and soon I took a role of a part-time supervisor position. I stayed at Edgewater Casino until March 22, 2009. At this date, due to economic downturn and low seniority in the Casino, I was lay off. That’s when I recognized this moment as the right one to go back to school and further pursue my dream.

As I said in the previews post, marketing project was different every time. In this project we were introduced to a case of a fictional company which developed a new product. Our job was to develop a marketing plan and the best pricing strategy for the new product. If you would like to see our work, feel free to click on the file below:

CANTY International

During the first term at BCIT, in the Marketing class, our group had to develop few Marketing plans. The Marketing plan was always of a different nature. We would be presented with real life situations in different firms. What we had to do was finding and developing the best possible marketing plan for a specific situation. One of these projects was the Blackberry vs. Apple Marketing strategy displayed below.

Please for review, click on the file below:

Rim vs apple

In our BSYS 1000 Lab I had to create a newsletter using Microsoft Word 2007. The topic of the newsletter was a fictional situation in which I just graduated from BCIT and was sending newsletter to possible employers. In this assignment I learned how to create newsletter, which could be used as a promotional or marketing material. The acquired knowledge could be used in any business for advertising or promoting a company, with little effort and budget.

Katavic Petar newsletter

While working on a Microsoft Word assignment for BSYS 1000 my group chose the following topic, “Introduction to Windows Vista”.

By doing this assignment we learned how to use MS Word and create functional manuals/instructions on any given topic and post them to a public Publishing web site as www.Lulu.com.

Here is the link to the manual on Lulu.com:
Introduction to Windows Vista

And the link to the word file as well:
Introduction to Windows Vista – Ali, Li, Sum, Katavic

For my first BSYS 1000 assignment my group members and I had to create a PowerPoint presentation with a topic: “Why we chose BCIT”! In order to express our knowledge, in using PowerPoint as a presentation tool, we came up with the following:

This video is the results of the project in which we shown how BCIT education gets you faster to your goal. The PowerPoint presentation was converted to a video using Camtasia softwere and after posted on YouTube.