When she arrived at NYU Stern in fall 2024, M.L. had three SIC seasons behind her — Junior in S11 (2022), Senior team co-lead in S12, and Featured Cohort selection in S13. Her admissions essay reused, almost verbatim, a paragraph from her S13 thesis on infrastructure REITs. Her interviewer asked her to walk through the position.
We sat down with her in March 2026 to ask what she would tell a student starting their first SIC season.
On the difference between “interesting” and “defensible”
“In S11 I picked a really interesting consumer name. I had no business defending it. I learned more from being wrong about that one position than I did from the eight I got right.”
The S11 position was an early-stage DTC eyewear brand. Her thesis was a brand story. Her rubric scores for thesis clarity (8/10) and evidence quality (4/10) explained where the bet had broken. The Editorial Desk’s published score breakdown was, in her words, “the first honest grading I’d ever received on financial reasoning.”
What changed in S12
For S12 she joined a Senior team and switched into industrials — specifically, US freight rail. The team’s S12 strategy report became the first entry in her academic record that she still hands to interviewers in 2026.
Three things they did differently:
- Built the revision calendar in week one. Eight scheduled check-ins, no exceptions.
- Read primary sources only. Earnings transcripts, rail STB filings, no aggregator summaries.
- Wrote the disconfirming case first, then built the thesis to clear it.
The team’s average revision-discipline score was 8.4/10, a full standard deviation above the S12 Senior median.
On the Omaha Dialogue Summit
She attended the S12 Summit as a participant and the S13 Summit as a Featured Cohort presenter. Both seasons her team brought a thesis-in-progress, not a finished position. Her advice to S15 entrants: do the same.
“The mentors at Omaha don’t care what your YTD is. They care whether your reasoning survives a real cross-examination. Bring something that’s still uncomfortable for you to defend.”
What she’d skip if she did it again
She would skip trying to copy a “winning” prior thesis. The Featured Cohort archive on the Hall of Fame page is, in her phrasing, “instructive but uncopyable.” The judging panel sees pattern-matching immediately and scores it down.
She would also start the application conversation earlier — applying in late May meant some school-side paperwork dragged into Regional Stage week one. “If you know you want to do it, just scan the QR in March.”
— SIC Editorial Desk · Alumni note, S11-S13 cohort