TCNJ

8 The College of New Jersey Magazine T yler Rummel '25 first noticed the stock ticker in his junior year. On the wall above an empty conference table on the second floor of the Business Building, the digital crawl made its way through the entire market, tracking the rise and fall of an endless string of corporate valuations. Long interested in the stock market, Rummel wondered what happened in that room. A fellow finance major filled him in: It was the home of the Student Investment Fund. Twice a week, a dozen or so students gather around the table and debate how they should manage nearly $1 million of real money, buying and selling with all the risk and reward of investment bankers. Rummel knew right away he wanted to be a part of it. Launched 25 years ago by finance professor Herbert "Buddy" Mayo, the Student Investment Fund has helped train generations of TCNJ students for futures in finance and investing. For many, it has figured prominently in the job interviews that kickstarted their careers. The fund has grown from an initial $120,000 to more than $850,000, given financial support to 120 local students attending the college, and offered its members an education they couldn't get any other way. "There's no classroom setting like this," Rummel says. When Mayo started the fund in 2000, he wanted students to have a hands-on opportunity to develop the skills they would need to guide invest- ment strategies as professionals. He knew that typical classroom exercises would only count for so much. "Hypo- theticals aren't the real thing; they're more like a game," he says. Mayo reasoned that real money would bring real stakes. And real lessons learned. He wrote to the school's finance alumni, promising to match any dona- tions they made to seed the fund. And to ensure that the money would serve a material purpose as well as an educational one, he committed to delivering 3 to 4% of its annual balance to incoming first-year students from the Ewing community. Each week, students divide into small teams and pitch which stocks they think the fund should buy or sell. Members present arguments and field questions from their classmates and their advisors — Mayo and his successor in the role, finance chair Seung Hee Choi. Pitches are put to a vote, requiring a two-thirds majority to pass. Although students receive indepen- dent study credit for their work with the fund, Mayo and Choi don't treat it as a class. There are no lectures and no textbooks. Instead, the advisors prod Tyler Rummel The fund has grown from an initial $120,000 to more than $850,000, given financial support to 120 local students attending the college, and offered its members an education they couldn't get any other way.

• Cover