For Vinny Rosamilia, Kennesaw State’s Student Managed Investment Fund was a transformative experience that helped him grow into the professional that he is today.
“I didn’t know how to wear a suit,” Rosamilia said. “Prior to joining SMIF, I didn’t have any background on here’s how you apply to a job, here’s how you interview, here’s how you dress yourself and walk around acting like a normal adult.”
Rosamilia now works at the Georgia Office of the State Treasurer as an investment operations manager overseeing a portfolio of about $55 billion.
It is the desire to achieve this sort of success that brings students to SMIF.
“One of the things that we realized was that we had some phenomenal students who wanted to go into investment banking, but nobody was recruiting from us because they didn’t know about Kennesaw and thought about it more as a community college,” Chairman of the SMIF board and economics professor Govind Hariharan said. “But we had students who could compare to the best students I’ve had in Buffalo.”
This led Hariharan to help found SMIF in 2010 to give students experience with portfolio management and investing with fellow students, which allows them to apply what they learn in the classroom in real time.
“The main priority of our group is to try and create a portfolio – essentially just a combination of different stocks from different companies – and try and recreate the S&P 500, which is the top 500 companies in the US,” Associate Director Justin Waters said. “So ideally, we try and manage money trying to invest it into companies as we see fit.”
Waters said that SMIF’s goal is to outperform the S&P 500. Working toward that goal means an unending cycle of teaching their newer members how to research companies and find the best fit for their portfolio.
“As upper management, our role is to kind of like teach them [new members] the proper steps and procedures of doing that research and upper management C-suite are really in charge of actually approving those trades,” Waters said.
SMIF Human Resources Director Luke Aumer describes the timeline of constructing an equity report as typically taking at least three weeks of work and many hours of peer review. That is not even counting the time members will be meeting in the SMIF room for crash courses, practice presentations and sector meetings. The overall message is that the more time a member puts into their reports, the better they will turn out and the more likely they are to be selected for SMIF’s end-of-semester presentations.
However, these presentations are not all that SMIF does. They also take part in competitions against other schools from across the region, state, country and world. Aumer explained that the Charter Financial Analysts research and ethics challenges are the two biggest ones that SMIF KSU competes in.
For the research challenge, teams of four to five people analyze a company, submit a full report that goes much more in-depth and then present it to judges. The ethics challenge involves teams researching a fictional financial firm for potential ethical and legal dilemmas and presenting their findings to a board of CFA charter holders. For the few that are selected to represent KSU at the CFA competitions, it is a great honor and opportunity.
“Very empowering and very stressful at the same time,” Aumer when asked how he felt about representing KSU. “I mean, there’s no bad outcome that can happen from participating in a challenge like that. Being selected to be part of a team like that, that alone is flattering and being able to produce quality work and present it with confidence, even if you don’t win first place, is still a great feeling.”
Another big event for the organization is SMIF Consortium where students attend conferences, find networking opportunities and can learn from their peers and some of the best in the industry.
“The advice was basically figure out what you like, and then figure out what you’re good at and then figure out if it meets your structural needs,” SMIF CEO Amitai Ilan said recalling the advice he received from a panelist at SMIFC earlier this year in Chicago. SMIF KSU placed second out of about 20 schools in this competition.
Any student can apply to SMIF. The only things they look for in a candidate are a 3.0 GPA and the ability for them to put in the necessary time commitment. Although many of their applicants are juniors looking for internship opportunities, SMIF is trying to advertise itself to lowerclassmen who may have an interest in finance. Although both Waters and Aumer emphasized the steep learning curve that lowerclassmen face to catch up to their upperclassmen peers, they say it is worth the extra effort.
Students who are interested in joining SMIF can apply on their website. For more information on SMIF, students can attend the Coles College Showcase that will be held in the spring.
