A little bit about Ithaca, NY...

If you can't already tell, I'm one of the few MBA students who came to Cornell with a family. My wife and I have three kids so location was a HUGE consideration for us when we were deciding which school to attend. I wanted my family to enjoy the two years and not be crammed in a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of a big city. Ithaca has been the ideal location for us - in fact my wife has been surprised how attached she's become to this place.

If you've ever been to Ithaca, you won't have to look longer than a couple minutes before you see a bumper sticker or t-shirt with the saying "Ithaca is Gorges". There are more waterfalls, lakes, gorges, and trails around here than you could possibly have time to visit in two years. The finger lakes area of upstate NY is one of the most spectacular parts of the contiguous states. I have to admit though, it does get painfully cold here in the winter time. But with places to go like Wegman's, the ScienceCenter, and the Museum of the Earth, there's always somewhere for the family to have fun no matter how much it's snowing outside.

And you don't even have to have three kids to like Ithaca! The Johnson School has such a close-knit community since nearly all of your classmates live within a mile of campus and you're always hanging out together. NYC is only 4 hours away, and it's easy to hitch a ride since there's usually a classmate or two taking a trip down on the weekends. Ithaca even boasts a small airport that will connect you directly to NYC, Philly, or Detroit. Of course there's a trade-off of not going to school in a major metropolis (like being further away from recruiters and industry events), but the quality of living and the intimate social environment have definitely been worth it.

20 Students Running $14 Million

Let me tell you about one of the biggest reasons I chose to attend Cornell. I wanted to learn the asset management business and Cornell is home to this thing called the Cayuga Fund. It's a student-run hedge fund, established as a separate entity from the school, that has grown to about $14 Million in AUM. The remarkable thing about the Cayuga Fund is that the money we manage belongs to legitimate investors expecting a return - it's not play money from a university endowment like most other student-run funds. I wasn't involved with the Fund during my first year at Cornell since it's designed for 2nd-year students only, but now that I'm one of the student portfolio managers, the Fund literally takes up half my time. It's a sweet deal - I get class credit for doing what I love to do.

Here's how it works. The Cayuga Fund has a proprietary quant model that spits out recommended stocks to buy and short. There are 20 student PMs (portfolio managers) each assigned to a specific sector (capital goods, energy, tech, consumer cyclicals, etc.). The PMs take the model-generated list of stocks and then perform fundamental research on each of the names in their respective sectors. When a PM has conviction to add a stock to the Fund on either the long or short side, the student pitches the idea to the group and then we vote on it.

I'm truly amazed at the amount of resources we have as students working on the Fund. Not only do we get to use systems like FactSet, StockVal, eSignal, and CapitalIQ, but we also have access to some of the best minds in the investment management industry. Student PMs on the Fund recieve instruction from Sanjeev Bhojraj (extremely talented professor at Cornell) and Dan Burnside (adjunct professor who runs a quant fund at Clover Capital). If there are any readers out there interested in applying to Cornell because of the Cayuga Fund (assuming I have any readers :), I would be happy to share more of my experience. Email me at crs63@cornell.edu.