Nichols School Investment Club

and academic support, the Learning Support Services Coordinators also serve as a central point of contact regarding each student’s progress. By centralizing data and remaining on the ready to answer any questions a student, family, or teacher may have, Nichols proactively works to ensure each student has the tools needed to thrive. Essential to this model and Nichols’ commitment to differential learning is close coordination between Hancock and Grundtisch. By working together, the academic journey students start as fifth graders continues throughout their years at Nichols.

“By expanding our Differentiated Learning, we bring together students, families, and teachers. Our students are supported, and, with our peer involvement, we advance the work of life. Our students are learning leadership, patience, and empathy, all attributes that you will need in any profession and work of life,” said Grundtisch. n

Walking into a meeting of the Nichols Investment Club you can immediately feel a change in atmosphere. Outside the room Nichols students are lively and laughing, but once you enter an Investment Club meeting you can tell students are ready to get down to business.

There are three main objectives each year of the Investment Club: to run investment simulations that help our students gain insight into personal finance, to invite presenters to campus to speak on topics ranging from basic investment strategies to more complicated topics, and to participate in the Wharton Global High School Competition.

Running investment simulations gives students an opportunity to see how money relates to their personal goals and the financial challenges they will meet to achieve them.

Through COVID, speakers were able to meet virtually. This opened up new opportunities for alumni who are not local to still connect with students. Often students use the Nichols professional alumni network as a resource to connect with alums in a particular field of interest. Most recently, Scott Saperston ’90, of Morgan Stanley, spoke to students about endowment management.

The Wharton Global High School Competition is by far the most time consuming and intensive project students work on each year. More than 1,300 teams from 64 countries come together to participate on this initiative. Each team is given a case-study featuring a potential client and a situation-based investment goal. Given $10,000 in virtual cash, each team works for ten weeks to develop an investment strategy, analyze industries and companies, and to build a portfolio. At the end, students write a paper that details two deliverables. That paper is reviewed by a team from Wharton and students are given feedback.

Dan Dolan, Nichols Chief Financial Officer, is the advisor to the Investment Club. “Participating in the Wharton program has given Nichols students a way to work on a project, see it progress in real-time and gain insights on their work from experts outside of Nichols. This provides students with hands-on experience in a field they might be interested in college and beyond.” n