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Wall Street now intersects with midtown Atlanta's Technology Square, where Georgia Tech College of Management has built a new high-tech, $1 million trading floor to prepare students for careers in investment banking and financial services.
The College dedicated the 2,000-square-foot Ferris-Goldsmith Trading Floor on November 24 in a private ceremony honoring the donors who made the facility possible: Joyce Ferris, widow of Dakin B. Ferris Jr., who earned his bachelor's degree in management from Tech in 1950 and was vice chairman of Merrill Lynch; and Barbara and Jere W. Goldsmith IV, a 1956 graduate of Tech's business school who is the semi-retired first vice president of investments at Merrill Lynch and former chairman of the Georgia Tech Foundation's Development Committee. The Ferris and Goldsmith gifts were augmented by Georgia Tech Foundation funds.
"We are tremendously grateful to Mrs. Ferris, Mr. and Mrs. Goldsmith, and the Georgia Tech Foundation for their support," says Steve Salbu, dean of the College of Management. "The Ferris-Goldsmith Trading Floor will go a long way toward truly differentiating our business school from the competition.
"Attracting students who are interested in brokerage and investment banking careers, and engaging our alumni who are already actively working in those fields, will result in graduates who are better prepared for Wall Street-type careers, as well as those related to issues of energy strategy and its financing," Salbu adds.
This type of trading floor is a rarity at all but the best business schools. Due to be fully functional early next spring, Tech's trading floor will include fifty-four dual-display computers as well as electronic stock information on the walls, training all levels of management students to use financial analysis and electronic trading tools. Management faculty will use the facility to research improved human performance in trading environments as well as the creation of new financial service models.
The trading floor will house Tech's new Quantitative and Computational Finance program, an interdisciplinary master's program ranked twelfth in the nation and led by faculty in the College of Management, School of Mathematics, and Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.
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