Capturing Returns on His IPS

Brett Meulmester captures his adventures in his photography, and captures returns as an Investment Club officer.  His academic pursuits lie primarily in Finance, but his IPS has also led him to experiment in Entrepreneurship.  What about his IPS has these interests crossing paths?  Brett's thoughts are below:

About me

I was born in California and grew up in Connecticut.  In high school I moved back west, so I've been in California for the past four years. I love being outside, enjoy taking hiking trips with my brothers when I have a free weekend. I love traveling with friends and family.  I had the opportunity to study abroad my fall semester of junior year in Barcelona, Spain, which was a great experience. I also recently visited Thailand, where among other things I rode elephants. With an interest in photography, I try to find interesting shots and stay away from the typical travel photos that you see in all your friends' albums.

At the College, I am a finance major concentrating in entrepreneurship. I am involved in the Investment Club as an officer, and this past year has been great for our organization. Hopefully we can sustain that growth into next year. I also was involved my sophomore year with the Finance Academy. Both groups have helped me further explore my interest in finance, and I would encourage all the underclassmen interested in business to check-out the business student organizations. It's one of the easiest ways to get plugged-in at the business school.

Highlights

Taking Entrepreneurial Ventures with Professor Ash was a great experience and really opened up my mind the possibility of starting my own business. When I first signed up for the class, I never thought I would go down that path, but throughout the semester, we learned valuable lessons as well as applicable tools to help us along the way.

Another great facet of the class was the Executive Partners who sat in on every class and provided feedback and guidance along the way. We met in groups once a week outside of class, which was a great experience, as we had access to all of their expertise for any subject. I left that class with the very real expectation that I might start my own company someday.

Defining Moment

I really enjoyed the Foundation Semester, as it provided a great overview to the different disciplines our school offers.  More importantly, it helped narrow my interests toward finance and entrepreneurship. My introductory finance class with Professor Atanasov was especially interesting. Some of my favorite moments in that class were when he illustrated applications of financial theory in seemingly unrelated areas such as roulette and horse racing. If creating discounted cash flow models hadn't yet piqued the class's interest, these sure did.

Summer Plans

This summer I am interning at a real estate investment manager in Southern California, which has been a great experience so far. Not having any experience in the field beforehand has proved something of a challenge, but I am learning a lot each day. One of my jobs is to basically help model different stress scenarios for a given property's cash flows, and see if it matches up with our company's investment criteria. Although it is mostly new to me, I am finding that a lot of my finance classes, especially fixed income and debt, have transferred over pretty easily. The real estate industry also rewards innovation, so this has further strengthened my entrepreneurial focus as well.