New York City · September 2026
Caden Campbell
Sophomore mathematics student at NYU, transferred from the University of Utah, where he studied honors finance and mathematics.
“We admire the canopy — the reach of its branches and the shade it provides. But that canopy is only possible because of a root system that is deep, dark, and entirely invisible.”
Dr. Charles Apoki
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Before 2025
I had planned to be a psychologist.
I always knew I enjoyed thinking about how people think and perceive, but never knew which application of it felt most engaging.
In high school I discovered my love for philosophy and psychology as a response to my natural enjoyment of analysis, and by senior year I'd declared as a psychology major with plans for a doctorate and psychiatry somewhere down the line.
Then, cliché as it sounds, an AP Economics capstone assigned me a company to do an economic deep dive on. Inspired by a movie I'd recently watched, mine was Benchmark Capital. Venture made immediate sense: it was psychology applied, it involved building things — something I'd been dabbling in since I was a kid — and it came with a job description that basically amounted to never being finished learning. I switched my major to finance before entering my first year of university.
August 2025 — April 2026
University of Utah, Honors Finance.
Salt Lake City. Dean's List, a 3.98, and a math minor.
My philosophy going in was simple: say yes to everything, and take on more than I thought I was ready for. Primarily because I genuinely wanted to learn, and partially because I knew the only way to close the gap between me and someone coming from a target school already knowing this material was to be more interested and put in more hours.
NeuroNate was the first real application of that philosophy. I co-founded it in October 2025 with a neonatal neurologist and four engineers for Utah's Bench to Bedside medical innovation competition. I was the business side of six: the packet below, the market sizing, the payer model and the projections are mine; the model itself was my team's.
The problem is real. Neonatal encephalopathy affects three to five of every thousand live births, EEG monitoring during therapeutic hypothermia is a validated way to predict outcomes, and it's still read by hand by a subspecialist who's often not even in the building. Our classifier called the outcome correctly 91.3% of the time in preliminary testing — a competition result, not a clinical one, since nothing's been tested prospectively and no hospital has run it. The startup died because the market was too small: between regulatory friction and long customer acquisition cycles, the time to ramp never justified the upside.
January — March 2026
Kpong, Ghana.
A woman had run an over-the-counter medicine shop for thirty years and kept every sale by hand; nobody had ever sat down and run data analytics on it.
We spent about eight weeks building consulting skills in a course at Utah, then went to apply them in the field for a week with a real business over spring break. I digitized more than nine thousand rows of handwritten sales logs and built the margin and seasonality analysis the shop had never had.
This being a one-week consulting project, we had to be extremely targeted in how we defined the goals of our work. After speaking with our client, we identified our central goal: our client is 80 years old and works 60+ hours every week, and we hoped to provide her the underlying data to inform business decisions that would alleviate her personal workload. Our deliverable to her was a twenty-six page report including qualitative analysis, competitor indexing, data analytics, and a recommendations section.
May — September 2026
Summer 2026.
Growth equity at University Growth Fund, healthcare buyout work at Cimarron Healthcare Capital.
University Growth Fund · Growth Equity
University Growth Fund is the largest student-run venture fund, allowing students to gain unparalleled experience in growth equity, venture and credit investing early in their careers, while simultaneously owning their work product and being given actual agency.
The most notable deal I worked on during my summer was a credit investment in a pediatric clinic roll-up I co-led, where I built the entire model: a delayed-draw term loan, a full debt paydown schedule, an acquisition engine that spends levered free cash flow on add-ons, and a returns waterfall running XIRR across the debt and equity sleeves.
Cimarron Healthcare Capital · Private Equity
A $500M AUM lower-middle-market healthcare buyout fund. The highlight of my time with Cimarron was the preliminary investment review I ran on an in-school pediatric therapy provider, where I built a multi-case LBO, the qualitative analysis, and a seventeen-page deck I presented to the firm — all of it my own work.
The thesis had two legs: federal law requires districts to provide these services, so demand isn't really discretionary, and once a district onboards it tends to stay, with retention in the low nineties and most partners buying more than one service line.
Everything below is anonymized. Names and geographies removed, every figure redacted or scrambled. What is left is the structure and the reasoning.
May 2026 — present
Scholars Opportunity Fund.
Scholars Opportunity Fund is a student-run start-up hedge fund investing in microcap equities using a quantitative approach. We are currently preparing to raise capital by building out our portfolio of signals and accumulating a real market track record.
At the firm I lead a two-analyst pod, building event-driven signals in sub-$1B microcaps end to end across research, gating, backtesting and deployment. Alongside leading my pod, I've been able to push more signals to production than anyone else at the fund. Detailed below are two signals built by my analysts and I.
- One groups equities by 10-K business description rather than trusting industry codes, which get too coarse this far down the market. Once that grouping is tuned, the way those companies report earnings and comove starts to carry real information about the ones that haven't reported yet.
- The other treats one kind of filing as a statement about a company's options, not about the transaction it announces, and hedges out everything it is not trying to say.
September 2026 —
New York University, B.A. Mathematics.
I love finance, but upon realizing that my subject of study is largely a non-factor in recruiting, I decided to follow the subject that persistently amazed me rather than the one I found fascinating but intuitive. I still plan to take many upper-level business courses, and will finish with a business minor, but it remains my math courses that get me excited for the next two years of university.
Where this is going
Goals.
Near term, I'm recruiting for banking and hedge fund seats — though candidly, I believe banking, while it fits my skills well, would get boring by year two. As such, the plan is to try to skip the traditional route, either straight to a hedge fund seat or by staying at Scholars Opportunity Fund long enough for it to become a real fund, keeping banking as a strong, secure option.
The north star
This is the thing that makes the hours worth it, the dream underneath all of it: starting a boarding high school in the Bay Area, built around education itself, on the theory that university prep takes care of itself once you get that part right.
I keep imagining a school where a student can request a course that doesn't exist yet — where a kid discovers philosophy, finds there's nowhere in the building to take it further, and that gap simply shouldn't exist. Alongside that: students from genuinely different backgrounds under one roof, real outside experience through internships, incubators and workshops, and an education that doesn't stop at the edge of the curriculum.
An institution built around the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Why Recalc
What draws me so strongly to Recalc's Finance Accelerator is twofold. First is the structure the program brings to investment banking prep, a process that easily turns unstructured on its own. That structure appeals to me because accountability and community are the conditions I learn, grow and perform best under. Second, the program puts me in a unique community of like-minded students to learn with and from.
I believe I'm a strong match for the program specifically because of that way I learn best: through programs with high learning ceilings that only give back what you put into them. That's what University Growth Fund was, and what we're building Scholars Opportunity Fund into, and both have been the most transformative experiences in my education as a young professional.