With the New Year under way, its a great time to resolve to get your portfolio in shape. Students at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business have been closely following the markets as they manage the $2 million Mayer Fund and the Lemma Senbet Fund, run by select groups of MBA and undergraduate students. The students are on pace to meet their goals to achieve healthy returns for the funds and outpace the S&P 500 index.

  Dick Cass, President of the Baltimore Ravens, has one of the most difficult jobs in football: running the organization. At the CEO@Smith event on Tuesday, Nov. 30, Cass spoke to more than 300 eager Smith School students and friends about the issues he deals with on any given Monday.

Will 2011 be the year to take the plunge and start a business? Asher Epstein, managing director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business is optimistic. He says entrepreneurs with good ideas should go for it – but proceed with caution. Epstein’s take for entrepreneurs in 2011:

Dick Cass, President of the Baltimore Ravens, has one of the most difficult jobs in football: running the organization. At the CEO @ Smith event on Tuesday, Nov. 30, Cass spoke to more than 300 eager Smith School students and friends about the issues he deals with on any given Monday.

Jim Parker, former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and chairman of the board of Southwest Airlines, is no stranger to the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business – but now he’s officially joined as an executive-in-residence at the school’s just-launched Center for Leadership, Innovation and Change (CLIC). On Dec. 9, 2010, Baltimore-area business leaders came to the University of Maryland BioPark to celebrate the launch of CLIC and to hear Parker’s address on “Leadership in Challenging Times.”

Tulkoff Food Products Inc. has been a Baltimore business since the 1930s and is particularly famous for its horseradish products. But processing two million pounds of raw horseradish each year has produced a big problem for the company. The process used to clean the roots generates 100,000 pounds of horseradish peels and 2.2 million gallons of dirty water annually. It costs the company $100,000 to send almost 250,000 pounds of discarded peels, dirt and sludge waste to a landfill each year. Tulkoff wanted to better align this process with its environmental initiatives.

The University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business hosted the world’s most dynamic researchers in finance and accounting for the 21st Annual Conference on Financial Economics & Accounting (CFEA), Nov. 12-13, 2010, in College Park, Md. The event was held in conjunction with the 2010 Maryland Finance Symposium. Myron Scholes, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Economics for his Black-Scholes theory and Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at Stanford University, gave the keynote address.

More than 130 people gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on Nov. 5, 2010 to learn and discuss “Innovation 2.0: Information Technology in Government and Business” – the topic of the Robert H. Smith School of Business’ 11th Annual CIO Forum.

Van Munching Hall’s Frank Auditorium was packed with students, faculty, staff, and dozens of alumni who are currently working at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to hear SAIC’s CEO Walter P. Havenstein on Nov. 3, 2010, for the CEO@Smith Speaker Series, sponsored by the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

In early November 2010, the atrium of Van Munching Hall was packed with almost 200 Smith MBAs and alumni who came to attend the 12th Annual Smith Consulting Forum, the largest event held by any professional student organization at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Organized by the MBA Consulting Club and the Office of Career Services, this year’s forum focused on the practice of “consulting in an unpredictable marketplace.”