Explain the Madison Investment Fund.

What we do is we manage a portion of the university's endowment, currently valued at about $500,000. So we're doing real stock pitches, really getting a great hands-on experience that kind of takes things that you may be learning in the classroom and puts them in a real-world setting.

Explain how the fund works.

There are seven sectors, and these are like different industries. There is tech, healthcare, industrials, consumers, energy, ESG, which is our sustainability group, and financial. We also have our portfolio management group, which is a separate group. What it does is take this holistic view of all our different stocks so when we want to buy a new company, portfolio management runs a lot of different quantitative tests on the back end to see if this this a good fit with what we already have.

So how many people are involved in Madison Investment Fund?

There are 20 full-time members and then about 20 of our potential new members who going through the training process for six to eight weeks that culminates in a big final project to hopefully get full-time admission into the organization.

Do you have a hand in the training yourself?

Absolutely yes. I have had a hand in the training for about three years now and am the fund’s president, so I kind of oversee everything. It’s two sessions a week roughly with these presentations that have been created and cultivated by current members and alumni over the years to give the best picture of practical application of finance and economics and things of that nature. How to fundamentally analyze a business, what a good pitch looks like and so on.

So what's next?

This past summer I had the incredible opportunity to intern up in New York and got a full-time return offer there at the firm Brinley Partners with their credit fund up in Manhattan. So I'll be going back really excited.

Did JMU help with securing your internship?

My time in the Madison Investment Fund mattered, along with talking to a JMU alumni—one who was specifically at the firm—which I’m sure helped me with the opportunity to interview when they opened up applications.

Did you feel qualified for the internship?

Over the summer, what I found was a lot of the hands-on experience I had gotten through the fund was super helpful in my internship experience. Being able to analyze companies, understand economic trends, and just go through the news and kind of connect the dots to how that might affect a company that's being looked at is a really important skill and one I've definitely cultivated during my time here.

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