Many think that because UVA’s Darden School of Business casts itself as a general management program that the school has no specialties. General management, however, is a philosophy that suggests that no business problem can viewed in isolation – that a finance problem relates to marketing, a marketing problem relates to operations and so on. So, in Darden Capital Management (DCM), Darden students can both test their general management principles by evaluating equities using a general management perspective to understand the entire firm and they can specialize in asset management in order to further their careers in this niche within finance.
Through DCM, first-year students pitch long and short investment ideas to second-year student fund managers who oversee the $5M of Darden’s endowment that are divided among several funds, each with its own focal area. Approximately 20 first-year students ultimately “graduate” and run these funds themselves, for credit as second-year students, reporting on their investment decisions and performance to the Darden Trustees. Students who manage these funds report that they have had an advantage breaking into asset management, as they have had a noteworthy conversation piece in interviews. Managing five million dollars will do that…
For more information on the UVA-Darden or 13 other leading MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.
Read the full article: Friday Factoid: Manage $5 Million at Darden