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the trading floor include accounting, CIS, management, finance, economics, and mathematics." Professors who don't utilize the trading room might soon be at a disadvantage. "These trading floors have really upped the ante for faculty in terms of what it takes to be relevant," says Brown. "When I came to the University of Texas in the mid-1980s, to be considered a relevant professor, you just had to clip an article out of that morning's Wall Street Journal and talk about it in class. Now, even an article in this morning's paper is old news. Once professors figured out how the trading room worked, they could make the whole classroom experience more immediate. Our students walk out of the room a lot more savvy about how markets work." Student Involvement Business students generally walk into the trading rooms excited about the possibilities, say administrators. At Baruch, the goal is for 100 percent of MBA students to have pro- grams that will make them familiar with the facility. The per- centage of undergraduates stands closer to 30 or 40 percent, says Weber, "just because the advanced classes can make use of the room more easily. Students have to understand the basic concepts of finance before they start talking about how to get options pricing data from the Chicago Board of Options Exchange." At Bentley, says Gregory, the trading room is used in core classes that all freshmen, sophomore, and junior business majors must take, so thousands of students stream through the facility every year. "It's very important that you move through in a stepwise progression, whether through orienta- tion programs or through integrating the facility into courses at the beginning of students' college experiences," he says. "First students must understand the functionality of the tools and the technology that is available. Then, as they move into their junior and senior years, they will begin to use that tech- nology more fully to analyze a particular business situation." The rewards for students are tremendous, Srivastava says. them have career paths that go in that direction, other graduates go on to trade energy derivatives, work in the corporate treasury units of multinational companies, or go to venture capital or consulting firms. Their choices aren't nearly as narrow as I thought they might be." While the volatile stock market has been a nightmare enhanced by the existence of the trading floor at the finan- cial center. "It was the investment management organization that really spelled out our need for the trading center," Brown says. "We then realized that while we needed to make the trading center specific to the student manager, it also had to be a general-use facility. The trading center has allowed us to create an informed and savvy student who understands how financial practices actually take place. All of that is accelerated at an exponential level for this particular group of students." for most individual investors, it's been a great learning tool for University of Texas students, Brown says. "Until recently, one of my regrets was that we'd been in a bull market since the middle '80s, with a couple of exceptions. I've turned out generation after generation of students who really didn't understand what it meant for a market to go down. That meant, when I talked about risk, it was just a theoretical concept for them." Today's market has given students a bet- ter appreciation of risk—and the way markets really work. The learning process in the MBAIF has been greatly "Actually doing something is much different from learning the theory of doing it. It's a very dynamic environment. When I run a training exercise, I don't know what's going to happen. No one knows what the ultimate outcomes will be. So we're all reacting to other people, and we're reacting to information. Students learn that the thought process they've developed helps them more than the blind application of any tool or technique. They learn the extent to which different techniques are useful, along with the biases, weaknesses, and strengths of specific tools." Students with hands-on trading room experience often have a better chance at landing a good job because they can save their employers six to 12 months of training time, Siam estimates. And the more updated the equipment, the more valuable the graduate. McMaster just upgraded the center's computers—and its students' level of knowledge. "We found we can develop some core knowledge here," Siam says. "We have established a program with Reuters so that our people are on call to demonstrate products to some of their clients. This means that Reuters must keep our equipment current so we can learn the very latest in its tech- nology. We also have a summer internship program with Reuters, which is another way for us to link our program with their company." For all business students, it's essential to keep pace with the z rapid technological changes occurring in the corporate arena. Students who have access to a trading floor, which is both high-tech and high-touch, will find it easier to keep their feet when they graduate into the fast-moving world of business. ■ BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 27