Spring Commencement 2023: Colton Morris, Davis College of Business and Economics
After he graduates on May 6 with degrees in finance and accounting, Colton Morris will head to Raleigh, North Carolina, where he’ll start work as a valuation analyst at the accounting firm Cherry Bekaert.
In that role, he said, he’ll be evaluating transactions involving mergers and acquisitions of non-public companies.
“If somebody is trying to sell their business, we give them a fair value of what the business is worth,” Morris explained. “Especially in terms of valuation of intangibles, so the buyer and the seller are getting a fair transaction.
“I definitely feel like Radford has prepared me to be able to go out and do that. I’m capable of going in and starting full speed.”
Morris’ career path is one whose roots stretch back to when he was still a student at Buckingham County High School in Buckingham, Virginia, a town that’s home to only about 200 people.
“It was a basic business class, and our teacher was very interactive, and we did a stock simulator through Yahoo Finance,” he recently explained.
The idea was the young students would analyze the market and invest one million imaginary dollars, then track how their hypothetical portfolios performed across a 90-day period.
Through that exercise, Morris “bought” smaller energy stocks alongside shares of larger companies, including Amazon, just before the company hit a 52-week high.
“I just killed it; I did great on it,” he recalled. “Overall, I had about a 25% return, and I was extremely happy.”
“If it had been real money, I would have made a quarter of a million dollars, so I knew from that point on that I wanted a career in investments.”
After high school, he first attended a local community college and earned his associate degree, then transferred to Radford University in the spring of 2021.
“My mother was a legacy from Radford, and I realized that Radford was a small enough school that I could have good class sizes, but I could also get a high level of education. It just seemed like the right fit for me,” he said.
His intuition proved correct, and coincidentally, in light of that formative high school business class, he got involved in Davis College’s Student Managed Investment Portfolio Organization (SMIPO), in which members supervise a small mid-cap value fund portfolio and decide how and where to invest actual capital. During his senior year, he became that group’s president.
In addition to gaining experience working with actual funds, SMIPO provided Morris the chance to travel far beyond the New River Valley on group trips to Chicago and New York, where he was able to meet with business professionals, including Brian Robinson ’93, head of prime brokerage sales for the Americas for Goldman Sachs.
“I’ve built a large network out of those experiences that I feel is going to help me going forward in my career. I don’t think I would get that many other places, especially to the degree that we got it,” Morris said. “The faculty at our school is so dedicated and engaged so much with students; I don’t know what my path would have looked like without it because they shaped it so much.”
As he surveys the future and prepares to head out to North Carolina – accompanied in his travels by his puppy Maverick, an 8-month-old goldendoodle – Morris views Robinson as a prime example of potential success, both for himself as well as for other Highlanders.
“If you’re dedicated enough, and if you want something bad enough, Radford can provide the education,” he said.