Stephen F. Austin State University

From the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, to a tour of the Federal Reserve Building, to lunch in the senate dining room at the U.S. capitol, a group of SFA business students spent Spring Break getting a behind-the-scenes look at places they have spent the semester studying.

The students were “VIP” guests for “Good Morning America,” which allowed them to tour the set and meet the talk show hosts.

While in New York, the students stood on the observation deck of the NYSE, as representatives from Lehman Brothers, a global investment bank, pointed out the trading posts and interaction between the specialists at each post and the brokers, according to Marcus Cox, a faculty sponsor for the trip.

“Some students realized they were seeing history being made,” Cox said. The NYSE is changing the way business has been conducted for the last 200 years, by phasing out much of the human interaction that students witnessed. Break-throughs in technology now allow negotiations and transactions to be conducted online, he said.

When students visited the Federal Reserve Board’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., they were allowed to sit around the table where the board of governors meets.

Each student had the opportunity to sit in the fed chairman’s chair, Cox said.

Students did some sightseeing, in addition to touring the places they have studied. They visited the Empire State Building, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Times Square — and had dinner one evening in an upscale restaurant.

One evening the students went to see a play at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Cox said.

One of the actors came out wearing an SFA T-shirt. Cox had arranged this surprise ahead of time with the group sales office at the Kennedy Center. The actors also made reference to “SFA,” during the play.

Cox said the Nelson Rusche College of Business works to provide one domestic and one international business trip for students each year.

Bob Coker, an SFA student from Nacogdoches, said, “There is no other class like Washington to Wall Street.”

“Marcus Cox has designed a course that is an interesting blend of classroom lectures around selected Harvard Business School cases and a week-long trip to D.C. and New York,” he said. “Capitalism, democracy and globalization come to life as students participate first-hand in history on the floor of the NYSE, in U.S. Senate Chambers and at the United Nations. We’re fortunate to have such a unique offering at SFA.”

Cox has been teaching the course since 2002.While visiting a friend in the nation’s capital a few years ago, he toured many of the places he talks about in class.

“I visited the World Bank, the Lincoln Memorial and the Environmental Protection Agency, and then I flew to New York and toured the New York Stock Exchange and the United Nations. Suddenly everything I was seeing went from being a bullet point in a lecture to something very tangible,” he said. “The subject matter had a whole new relevance.”

Cox returned to SFA and typed up a proposal for the dean of the college of business and the provost. He told them he wanted to take his business students to experience the same things he had experienced.

After receiving approval to coordinate the trip, he called his friends and connections in D.C. and New York and said, “Can I come back for another tour and bring 18 people with me?”

“It was a real leap of faith to get this started,” Cox said, adding that he begins recruiting students in August for the course on which the trip is based. Travel arrangements and scheduling begin shortly thereafter, and follow-up phone calls keep Cox and other trip planners busy until the day they board the plane.

Other faculty sponsors for the trip included Dr. Violet Rogers, dean of the college of business, and Debbie Dufrene, department chairwoman.