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.
