Chad Heyda

I spent the summer interning for the CFO of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). WARF was founded in 1927 as a non-profit that manages and licenses the intellectual property produced by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. WARF has over 2 billion dollars in assets and returns a portion of the earnings as well as licensing income in the form of an annual grant back to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to further fund more academic research and other projects. To date, WARF has provided grant funding of nearly $1B.

At the start of my internship I was immediately submerged into high-impact projects such as organizational benchmarking and metrics evaluations, working on issuing tax exempt corporate bonds, implementing an organizational wide purchasing card system that is integrated with their accounting software, as well as assisting with budget planning and updating. However, my main and favorite project was to build the valuation model that will help the management and board members determine whether to enter in to a long term lease of office space or construct a new building.

I will likely continue my internship part-time during the school year.