A student-managed fund at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is providing more than just real-life investment experience for finance students.
The students are helping the UC foundation earn better than average returns on its holdings through the Student Managed Investment Learning Experience (SMILE) Fund which has been investing university funds since 2015. At the same time, the student stock pickers have consistently formed winning teams in national competitions that are elevating the status of UTC’s finance department.
“The SMILE Fund offers a very hands-on experience that you can’t exactly learn in a classroom or in a textbook,” said Melissa Mueller, a UTC finance senior who served as president of the SMILE Fund until January and was part of teams that won both regional and global competitions among top finance colleges. “It was really cool to be gaining this kind of real-life experience as a 20-year-old college student and to be able to work with such a great team of students and faculty.”
Mueller and the other 51 SMILE Fund students have helped the UC foundation grow the portion of the endowment it controls to more than $850,000. The lessons learned in the club also help the students compete in a number of investment challenges among finance colleges across the country.
Mueller was part of a five-member student team that earned global honors in January by winning the national Equity Research Report Challenge for their analysis of CanWel, a Canadian lumber company. UTC won the top honors in the tournament for the second consecutive year among schools from throughout North America.