Chris Pharr
Pharr is a part-time MBA student at the University of Maryland. He’ll soon be acting as one of two student managers for the Robert H. Smith School of Business’ Global Equity Fund, which will invest part of the school’s endowment.
How did the program develop? There is already a program similar to this for full-time students, but there wasn’t anything for part-time students. A group of people, including myself, wanted to see if we could start something similar. At first it was going to be a club that could invest our own money. Then, we thought we could do something similar to the full-time students and get some endowment money to invest.
How much money will you get to work with? We’re not sure yet what the amount is going to be.
Is this project unique? There are other, similar ones at other schools, especially in MBA programs. When we started to look at this on our own we looked at charters from other schools like Harvard. We got ideas that way.
How will the project work? The way I understand it, it will be a chunk of money for the whole group and we will invest it in a mix of different things. We’re planning to have analysts focused on different geographic regions — two on the Americas, two on Europe, two on Asia and two on macro-level things like commodities. There will also be two student managers. We will meet once or twice a week and will earn credit.
Are you excited about this class? Yes; I come from an IT background and it [investing] isn’t something that I have a lot of real world experience doing. I’m just excited about getting that experience.
Why do you think this is a good opportunity? It gives everyone some quasi-real-world experience, and it also sets you apart from the rest of the MBA students. … It also breaks up the monotony of listening to lectures everyday. It’s a nice change of pace.
