Fall 2014Newsletter

Letter From The Chair

Student Success

Alumni Updates

Faculty Excellence

Giving Back

Stay Connected

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Contents

Dear Alumni and Friends of the Finance Area,

These are exciting times for both the faculty and the students at the Orfalea College of Business. We started the fall term with a new dean, Scott Dawson, who brings more than a decade of experience as the dean of Portland State University’s School of Business Administration. The Orfalea College of Business has also adopted a new vision statement to become the “undisputed leader in experiential business education.” With that in mind, the Finance area faculty strives to create a culture of achievement, excellence, hard work and integrity founded on our university’s Learn by Doing ethos.

Our 2014 newsletter provides an update on our efforts to provide our academically talented students with hands-on experiences and opportunities for growth and discovery. I am pleased to report that the finance concentration continues to grow. Our students are among the best graduates from the Orfalea College of Business, as evidenced by their exceptional performance on the Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA) exam, in other student competitions, and through the Student Managed Portfolio Project. As you will read, our alumni are enjoying amazing success in their careers and higher education pursuits. Finally, I am pleased to report that we have built a dynamic faculty who will ensure the college continues to deliver forward-thinking educational opportunities.

In short, we are proud of the many successes of the financial management program at Cal Poly. We owe much of our success to your good works and your continued financial support of our program. At this time of the year, we urge you to consider directing part of your annual tax-deductible contributions to support student scholarships and our innovative curriculum.

Thank you for your support, and enjoy the content of the 2014 Finance Newsletter.

Cyrus RamezaniFinance Area Chair

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State of the Area

Finance I S T H EM O S T

P O P U L A Rconcentration inCAL POLY’SOrfalea College of Businessw i t h m o ret h a n300s t u d e n t s

The Orfalea College of Business has honored a finance student with its 2013 and 2014 Outstanding Student Award.

David Albrecht with Assistant Dean Kris McKinlay in 2014.

2014 Suma Cum Laude

Finance Graduates

(GPA 3.85+)

David Albrecht

Madeline Allenspach

Courtney CarbonettiBack Row (left to right): Steven Chaloupka, Cody Van Boxtel, Greg Rattray, Alyssa Gustafson, David Larsen, Austin Flores, Benjamin Dunbar, Brett Kitson, Jason Koss, Steven Marshal, John AndersonFront row (left to right): Scott O’Brien, Luis Salinas, Michael Prodromou, Corey Cisney, Ricardo Jalteco, Cyrus Ramezani, Robert Ricci, Hubert Lo, Glenn Cooper, Xu Qian

Elise Mincey with President Jeffrey D. Armstrong in 2013.

Student Managed Portfolio Project (SMPP) Team 2013-14

The Outstanding Student Award

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CFA Research Challenge SuccessIn February, an interdisciplinary team of business students won the Charter Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute Research Challenge held in Los Angeles. Cal Poly finance majors Alyssa Gustafson, Jason Koss, and Cody Van Boxtel and information systems student David Larsen were advised by finance professor and chair Cyrus Ramezani, San Luis Obispo financial advisor Phillip Cohl, and 2005 Cal Poly finance alumnus and CFA charter holder Scott B. Kirk. The competing teams were charged with analyzing and making buy/sell/hold recommendations for the subject company, Mattel Inc. The Cal Poly students competed against teams from Claremont Graduate School’s Drucker School of Management, Loyola Marymount and USC. Cal Poly’s team went on to the CFA’s Americas Regional competition in Denver, where it competed against universities from the U.S., Canada and Latin America.

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FMA Honored as Outstanding ClubAt the Orfalea College of Business’ annual spring banquet, the Financial Management Association was recognized for its innovative member activities during the 2013-14 academic year.

Tyler Beaty (left) and club President Brian Hanson (right) accepted the award on behalf of Cal Poly’s FMA members.

CFA Research Competition in Los Angeles. Left to right: Cody Van Boxtel, Cyrus Ramezani, Phil Cohl, Alyssa Gustafson, David Larsen and Jason Koss.

This year’s cohort of CFA Challenge participants is gearing up to tackle the CFA Level 1 exam in December. Since the establishment of the CFA Challenge at Cal Poly in 2007, the course has grown to include undergraduate and master’s degree candidates in the Orfalea College of Business. Each year, those students have outperformed the national pass rate by significant margins, and graduates who go on to take the CFA Level 2 and 3 exams have done so with great success.

Front row (left to right): Katarina Quach, Charles Koch, Jessica Siu, Cyrus Ramezani, Jina Im, Sebastian Kong. Back row (left to right): Joseph Hamwey, Mike Berg, Davis Matthews, Grant Jurgensen, Curtis Maslonkowski, David Faucher

CFA Challenge Cohort Prepares for December 2014 Exam

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Finance graduates have proven to be some of the most successful alumni in the Orfalea College of Business. The data on 2013 graduates show that nearly 83 percent of those surveyed were employed or going to graduate school. The median starting salary was $55,000, with several graduates making more than $100,000 in their first jobs. Graduates have pursued careers in the Bay Area, San Diego and the Pacific Northwest at companies including Piper Jaffray, J. P. Morgan Chase, Oracle, Clorox, Triage Consulting, Apple and Deloitte.

“Clorox started recruiting at Cal Poly in 2008, and over the last six years Cal Poly grads had a big impact on the organization. We have pitched new products and taken them to market, identified and delivered millions in cost savings, and provided business insights across the organization. Management has recognized the talent at Cal Poly and made it a primary recruiting school. They understand that Cal Poly grads are not only equipped with a strong technical education but also have the communication, business acumen and leadership skills that set them apart from their peers. Recently our general manager recognized alumnus Paul Culbertson in a division-wide meeting for his financial support that enabled the company to take three large cleaning innovations to market. Paul now leads Clorox recruiting at Cal Poly.”

– Ryan Erdman, Class of 2009

Finance Graduates Prove Career Ready

A group of Cal Poly finance students in the Orfalea College of Business achieved outstanding success in June on the CFA Level 1 exam, with a pass rate of 61 percent — well above the exam’s average pass rate of 42 percent. Cal Poly students prepare to take their Level 1 exam as part of the CFA Challenge, a senior project created by Cyrus Ramezani, professor and Finance area chair.

Finance faculty construct the yearlong CFA Challenge to be an intense, self-directed study of financial ethics, economics, accounting and quantitative methods. Students take multiple full-length practice tests, each spanning six hours.

Finance Students Excel On CFA Exam

“This is a testament to our college’s mission to prepare career-ready graduates,” said Scott Dawson, dean of the Orfalea College of Business. “These students have proven they’re ready to not just enter the workforce but to also lead the field of finance from their first day of work.”

Financial management students Tabitha Ahearn and Tyler Henderson represented the Orfalea College of Business as 2014 Homecoming princess and prince.

Finance Students Represented College as 2014 Homecoming Prince and Princess

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Zach Kirkman, (B.S., Finance, 2008) began a six-year finance career at Apple after graduation. He spent almost two years in the Finance Development Program, completing short rotations across various business teams, including assignments in Tokyo and London. He spent 18 months in Apple retail corporate, where he forecasted customer demand for Macs and iPads across all Apple retail stores. He then spent almost three years on the Corporate Development/Mergers & Acquisitions team, helping execute all aspects of Apple’s acquisitions, while providing analysis to executives that support many other initiatives.

In September, Zach began the two-year MBA program at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Along with the regular MIT Sloan curriculum, he is earning a certificate in entrepreneurship & innovation, which brings like-minded students together very early in the MBA program to meet, integrate and learn about startup business concepts and to experience the unique entrepreneurial ecosystem at MIT. After MIT Sloan, Zach intends to continue his career in the technology industry.

Lia (B.S., Finance, 2008) is beginning her second year in the Harvard MBA program. Traveling from San Luis Obispo to Boston, she had to go around the world a few times.

“After graduating from Cal Poly, I spent two years as an investment banking analyst in Citigroup’s Palo Alto office, where I advised on M&A and capital markets transactions in the technology sector. Leveraging the financial toolkit I built at Citi, I later consulted with a technology venture capital fund and nonprofit focused on entrepreneurship in the Middle East. After working with several Egyptian and Jordian entrepreneurs and traveling extensively in Asia and Latin America, I left to pursue an emerging-markets-focused role at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private investing arm of the World Bank. As an investment analyst at IFC, I worked on development finance of mining and infrastructure projects, primarily in Africa. That work took me to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and Burkina Faso, among other out-of-the way places. After two and a half years at IFC, I enrolled in the MBA program at Harvard Business School.”

Lia LazarALUMNI PERSPECTIVE

Zach in front of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, Turkey.

Lia in front of salt flats in Ethiopia.

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Alumni Updates

David Hanson (B.S., Finance, 2012) is pursuing a master’s degree in higher education at the University of Pittsburgh. He also serves as a graduate assistant for the university’s men’s basketball team. Ultimately he would like to be a Division 1 men’s basketball coach.

Annin Busch (B.S., Finance, 2012) has been with Protiviti for more than two years. She transferred to its Pittsburg, Penn. office after getting married and has been working with major energy exploration and production companies that have started in the Marcellus shale formation.

Phil Chen (B.S., Finance, 2013) started his career in London with Reed Online. He returned to the U.S. to work in business development and account management for a venture-backed startup called Swarm Mobile while taking continuing studies courses at Stanford. Phil now works as an analyst for the Gores Group, a private equity firm in Los Angeles, as an analyst focusing on telecom, media, technology and industrial clients.

David Dudek (B.S., Finance, 2010) completed his CFA Level 3 exam and is a senior associate of First Republic Investment Management in San Francisco. He recently got married in Santa Margarita, Calif., not far from Cal Poly.

Kyle Martin (B.S., Finance, 2004) is a credit investment analyst at First Western Capital Management, a Los Angeles-based fund manager, where he focuses on investing in high yield bank loans and investment-grade corporate bonds. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and earned his MBA from USC in 2013.

Executives in ResidenceALUMNI ON CAMPUS

This fall the Orfalea College of Business began its Executives in Residence program by welcoming business leaders to campus to engage with the Cal Poly community while seeing the impact of Learn by Doing firsthand. Roughly half of the executives have been Orfalea College of Business alumni. The program began with a visit from Dolores Bernardo (B.S., Finance, 1996), who leads Google’s manager development programs globally. While on campus, Dolores shared her insights from her roles at Google, Accenture and Catalyst during faculty roundtables and student question-and-answer sessions. For more details on the Executives in Residence program, visit the Orfalea College of Business website.

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Matthew Boysan (B.S., Finance, 2004) earned a degree in elementary school education from Cal Poly and a master’s degree in theological studies at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley. He has since found his niche in grant writing and fundraising for nonprofits that supports his ministry in the areas of social justice, youth development and community development.

Matt Keating (B.S., Finance, 2012) recently passed his CFA Level 3 exam, and he has taken a role as an analyst on the iPhone team at Apple.

Daniel Lucas (B.S., Finance, 2006) studied finance at Cal Poly while in an exchange program from Germany in 2006. While at Cal Poly, he made many friends and met his future spouse, who he married this summer. Daniel returned to California to finish his master’s degree in financial engineering at UC Berkeley last year. He is currently working as a currency trader at MERK in the Bay Area. He was recently featured in a cover story in Traders Magazine. Read the full article here.

Johnny Choumas (B.S., Finance, 2008) is a management consultant at Deloitte, where he has worked on a number of projects involving financial strategy. According to Johnny, Deloitte has also given him a full MBA scholarship and opportunities for personal and professional growth. He’s pictured here with his fiancé, Lauren, on Lake Como in Italy.

William Ranish (B.S., Finance, 2009) is completing his second year of Duke University’s MBA program.

Tom Nguyen (B.S., Finance, 2009) has the startup bug. His company, Carkibo, is seeking seed funding.

NOVEMBER 14, 2014

Finance Research DayCal Poly’s finance and economics faculty hosted its first Finance Research Day with the Santa Clara Leavey School of Business. Together, faculty from both institutions presented and reviewed a series of research papers with time for live discussion. This year’s theme was empirical corporate finance. The event allowed both universities to expand research collaboration with each other in finance and economics.

For more information and links to each paper, visit the Orfalea College of Business website.

Christopher McMullan (B.S., Finance, 2011) is currently part of the health care team at Summit Partners, a $15 billion private equity firm in Boston.

Jeffrey Messerschmidt (B.S., Finance, 2009) is currently a tax manager at Navolio & Tallman LLP, a boutique CPA firm in San Francisco specializing in hedge funds, venture capital, private equity and real estate funds.

Carlo Pedrazzini (B.S., Finance, 2006) has accepted a new role as a vice president with Union Bank in San Francisco.

Donovan Trone (B.S., Finance, 2009) has completed his CFA Level 3 exam and continues to work with Moss Adams LLP in Sacramento. He also got married this summer.

Ryan Pease (B.S., Finance, 2008) is the owner and winemaker of Paix Sur Terre Winery in Paso Robles. He and his wife, Nicole, just completed their fifth vintage since leaving Cal Poly.

Tara Zahiri (B.S., Finance, 2013) has excelled with Fisher Investments for the past year. In the future, she’s looking to expand her career into investment banking.

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Faculty News

Bryan Ayash joined Cal Poly in 2014, teaching in the areas of corporate finance and entrepreneurship. Ayash is a certified public accountant, CFA charterholder, and certified insolvency and restructuring advisor. In the private sector, he has worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, FTI Consulting, and Alvarez & Marsal Europe. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from Clarkson University, MBA from the University of Rochester, and Master of Science and doctorate in business administration from UC Berkeley.

Bing Anderson joined Cal Poly in 2004. He is working on research in mathematical finance related to a grant he received from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He has also published articles regarding the possibility of a state bank in California as well as real estate and consumption in China. Anderson is a recipient of an Orfalea College of Business Interdisciplinary Research Grant. He also welcomed a son, Patrick, in 2013.

Ziemowit Bednarek joined Cal Poly in 2012. His research interests involve both corporate finance and asset pricing. In 2014, he published articles in Economics Letters and Journal of Economics and Business, among other titles. He started his finance career in Poland with KPMG in 2002, after completing his master’s degree at the Warsaw School of Economics. Prior to coming to Orfalea College of Business, he had a tenure-track appointment with the University of Melbourne in Australia. Bednarek earned his doctorate from UC Berkeley.

John Dobson joined Cal Poly in 1990. He recently received an interdisciplinary research grant to work with co-author Eleanor Helms, assistant professor of philosophy at Cal Poly, on the integration of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s work into a “theory of the firm.” He is also working on a new edition of “Readings in Financial Ethics” book, co-authored with Jean Heck. He recently published an article on insider trading in the Business and Professional Ethics Journal. This year, Dobson is teaching a new course in global finance markets and institutions.

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Garland Durham joined Cal Poly in 2014. His research is focused in the area of financial econometrics with applications to risk management and bond and option pricing. His most recent work involves the development of methods and software for efficient sequential simulation of Bayesian posteriors. Durham’s research has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Econometrics, and Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. Durham teaches courses in corporate finance, fixed income, options and futures, and data analytics. Durham has also done extensive private sector work involving modeling, forecasting and data analytics while serving as senior economist at Quantos Analytics LLC. He earned his doctorate in economics from the University of North Carolina.

Larry Gorman joined Cal Poly in 1997. He is nearing completion of his book “Mastering the Fundamentals of Finance. Building Skills and Intuition.” The book utilizes previously unavailable technology in the form of a new style of financial calculator through two pending patents. The book also includes examples of how to solve finance problems using the matrix programming language Matlab. When not teaching at Cal Poly, Gorman teaches finance and forecasting at Apple.

Cyrus Ramezani joined Cal Poly in 1999 and has served as the area chair since 2006. Ramezani has taught a variety of courses at Cal Poly and currently teaches the Student Managed Portfolio Project and the CFA Challenge. Ramezani’s research interests are in the areas of portfolio management, financial statement analysis, Bayesian and other statistical methods, and options and derivatives. Recent research projects include Bayesian estimation of stock price dynamics, application of exchange options to environmental policy, and design of financial contracts to promote investment in energy efficient technologies. Ramezani earned his doctorate from UC Berkeley.

Pratish Patel joined Cal Poly in 2013. Patel’s research focuses on corporate and real estate finance, including rent-to-own challenges. Patel collaborates with faculty in the Orfalea College of Business, conducting research with economics professor Sanjiv Jaggia regarding economic incentives for tenant and landlord. His research on compensation was recently published in Economics Letters. Patel’s teaching interests include real estate finance, real estate investments, and options and futures. Prior to joining Cal Poly, he founded a startup and traded in the energy markets. Patel earned a master’s degree in financial engineering and a doctorate in business from UC Berkeley.

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Mahdi Rastad joined Cal Poly in 2012. His teaching interests include corporate finance, valuation, mergers and acquisitions, fixed income markets and impact evaluation. Rastad’s research spans several areas of finance and economics, including corporate finance, corporate governance, public pension funds, and energy economics. Rastad has published his research in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance as well as the National Bureau of Economics Research. He holds a doctorate in economics and a master’s in finance from the University of Illinois.

Giving BackWhen making your philanthropic contributions this year, consider a tax-deductible gift to the Finance area of the Orfalea College of Business. Visit our giving website to make a contribution in support of our area’s student programs.

Meet Your MatchDid you know that many large employers offer philanthropic gift matching? Find out if your business is one of them, and double your impact at Cal Poly. Certain employers can also match recent gifts or a spouse’s gift. Visit our matching gifts page to find out more.

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Say HelloCalifornia Polytechnic State UniversityOrfalea College of BusinessFinancial Management AreaSan Luis Obispo, CA 93407-0300

Financial Management Area OfficeBusiness Building, Room 407Office Phone: 805-756-1472

Department Chair: Cyrus RamezaniAdministrative Coordinator: Sheila Smith

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FINANACIAL MANAGEMENT