From classroom to capital: Amani Kimball-McKavish’s internship opens doors to real estate investing

By Vicki Christian
Fisher College of Business

As an undergraduate student, Amani Kimball-McKavish (BSBA ’25) had dreams of becoming a marketing strategist at a boutique ad agency. She yearned to channel her creativity on projects and branding for companies. But as she moved further into her degree program and broadened her career interests to include entrepreneurship, she discovered areas in which she needed to grow.

“Through programs such as the Best of Student Startups (BOSS) and the President’s Buckeye Accelerator, I found that an integral part of building a business or being involved in any company at any role, you need to understand finance,” said Kimball-McKavish. “With an interest in becoming an entrepreneur and CEO one day, I thought it would be very valuable to get a finance degree as well.”

She enrolled in Fisher’s Specialized Master in Finance (SMF) program in autumn 2025.

“It was a little bit daunting going into finance,” she said. “No one that I’m close to is in finance. I was kind of lost because there were just so many opportunities and I didn't really know where to start. After many conversations with Fisher faculty and people in my network, I ultimately settled on investments.”

As part of the SMF experience, Kimball-McKavish spent time this summer as a real estate private equity summer analyst at Rockbridge in Columbus. The company’s culture was an immediate appeal to her.

“Their CEO describes it as an athletic culture and a team environment,” she said. “As a former Ohio State lacrosse player and athlete, that's one of the things that is super, super important to me. If you're going in to work every day for 10-hour shifts, you need to be able to rely on the people around you and know you’re all working towards a unified mission and goal.”

While she said the start of her internship was a bit of trial by fire and felt like she was being thrown to the wolves, she asked tons of questions and learned from many mistakes. Eventually, she got into the office’s daily rhythm of working on models, reviewing profit and loss statements, creating comparison analyses and marking up confidentiality agreements.

In her role, she evaluated and underwrote prospective hospitality investments.

“I worked in the investments group on the acquisitions team, which is the group that looks at potential new properties to purchase,” Kimball-McKavish said. “The team underwrites the properties and goes through due diligence to make sure that it fits within the company’s portfolio and offers the correct returns.”

She worked on financial modeling, the process of building a mathematical abstraction of a company's financial performance. To do so she combined historical data, market research, a mix of debt and equity and future assumptions about an asset to forecast cash flows, assess investment opportunities and guide business decisions.

“Once you get a company’s financials, you put it in an Excel model to underwrite the deals,” she said. “You build a model based off of the profit and loss statements, add your own assumptions and create an outcome to project for future returns.”

“In my classes, I've learned a lot in Excel, so it was great to be able to understand exactly what I was doing with the hotel. I even used a little bit of my marketing background to paint a picture of the hotel and what it could be to help make decisions.”

Financial modeling, however, has its limitations. The hospitality industry, she said, provided additional lessons and challenges including understanding how detailed it is to operate a hotel and that there are many components of a business you have to consider when analyzing a deal.

“Working in the model and being able to understand why I analyzed things and made my own assumptions was really cool,” she said. “It was pretty awesome that the people I worked with trusted me with that challenge.”

During her internship, she and a fellow intern won a three-day case study based on a previous deal Rockbridge had negotiated. The project included modeling, sale price negotiation, market analysis, extensive strength and risk identification and an investment committee package presentation.

“We started from scratch and underwrote the deal,” Kimball-McKavish said. “We put it in a model to understand the market, the key strengths and weaknesses of the deal and how we could improve the asset.”

She’s also had the opportunity to tour a number of local hotels that Rockbridge owns, including The Junto, the under-construction Merchant Building and the Hilton Polaris.

During her time at Rockbridge, she’s realized just how social the business of hospitality is.

“I think the number one thing in hospitality is that you have to be friendly and welcoming in order to make a deal happen,” she said. “You have to be a great storyteller, a great conversationalist. You have to want to get to know people on a personal level and build relationships in order to make deals happen.”

The experience has changed how she’ll look at hotels during her future travels.

“What I knew about hospitality was from the places I've traveled and what I like and don't like,” Kimball-McKavish said. “So, to be able to analyze all of my travel experiences from a new perspective and think about it from a business standpoint versus just a relaxing experience has been really cool.”

She also enjoyed the research aspect of the job.

“For six months to a year you become an expert on this one property you’re trying to buy,” she said. “By the end you know every single financial point and detail about the hotel including the room size, when it was built, who bought it and who built it. And so I think it's really cool that you get to deep dive into an asset and become an expert on it.”

Her SMF classes benefited her in every aspect of her internship. From a real estate course where she learned formulas and how to value a real estate deal, to understanding modeling, portfolio management, performance analysis, balance sheets and cash flows, she used knowledge from every class.

Those lessons, she said, would have been even more helpful following the success she had as an undergraduate entrepreneur, including winning $50,000 from the President’s Buckeye Accelerator program for an idea for a streaming network that broadcasts lesser-known collegiate sports; and $5,000 through the summer 2025 BOSS competition for SMYLE, a toothbrush that incorporates floss into the brush.

Although she’s looking forward to her last semester in the SMF program and loved what she was doing at Rockbridge, she’s undecided about her next step. The internship experience, however, reinforced Kimball-McKavish’s passion for entrepreneurship.

“Being at Rockbridge has helped solidify that, at one point in my life, I want to start my own company and be a CEO,” she said. “What’s great about Rockbridge is that each asset is like its own business, and the skills I learned through my internship will certainly serve me well when it comes time to open my own business.”