Many think that because the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business casts itself as a general management program, the school has no specialties. General management, however, is a philosophy that suggests that no business problem can viewed in isolation—for example, a finance problem relates to marketing, a marketing problem relates to operations and so on. In the student club Darden Capital Management (DCM), students can apply general management principles in evaluating equities to understand the entire firm while also specializing in asset management to further their careers in this finance-industry niche.
Through DCM, first-year students pitch long and short investment ideas to second-year student fund managers who oversee $5M of Darden’s endowment, which is divided among five 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 Darden’s finance board. Students who manage these funds report that they have had an advantage breaking into asset management, because this hands-on experience gives them plenty to discuss in interviews. Managing $5M will do that…
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