The Lasting Lessons of Warren Buffett: UVA Darden Students Make the Pilgrimage to Omaha

When Carter Love (MBA ’26) was a pitcher at the College of Charleston, he woke up every day hoping for a chance to get to Omaha, Neb. to compete in the College World Series. Love would later go on to play in the Chicago White Sox organization, but never made it to the “Greatest Show on Dirt.” Recently, he got his next best thing: attending Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting.

“The annual meeting  had been a dream of mine since I was about 15 years old and started reading books on Warren Buffett,” says Love. “It was definitely one of the cooler moments of my professional career.”

For more than six decades, tens of thousands of investors from around the world have descended on Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, a financial pilgrimage famously dubbed the “Woodstock for Capitalists.”

Last year, Warren Buffett — widely regarded as one of the greatest investors in history — announced plans to step down as chief executive after six decades leading the conglomerate he transformed into one of the world’s most admired companies.

For Love and nine other students from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, the trip offered more than a chance to hear Berkshire leadership discuss markets and business strategy. It was also an opportunity to experience firsthand the energy of the cavernous exhibit hall featuring dozens of Berkshire companies, including Dairy Queen and Squishmallows.

The trip, organized through the Richard A. Mayo Center for Asset Management and Darden Capital Management (DCM), immersed students in a weekend of long-term investing.

“DCM manages close to $40 million of the Darden endowment through deep equity research and picking stocks we want to hold for the long term,” Love says. “That is exactly what this  annual meeting preaches.”

DCM consists of 28 second-year students chosen to actively manage six investment portfolios for the Darden School Foundation for course credit. Love served as portfolio manager of the Sustainability-Focused Rotunda Fund.

Darden students explored the 200,000-square-foot exhibit hall where shareholders can buy products from Berkshire portfolio companies.

The Omaha experience began with a tour of First National Bank of Omaha hosted by Clark Lauritzen, chairman and president of FNBO and son of late Darden alumnus Bruce R. Lauritzen (MBA ’67). Students later explored the 200,000-square-foot exhibit hall where shareholders can buy products from Berkshire portfolio companies.

The main event came Saturday morning, when the students joined thousands of shareholders lining up before dawn to enter the packed arena. Inside were business icons, investors and executives — including Apple CEO Tim Cook and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman — all gathered to hear Berkshire leadership discuss the future of the company and the broader economy.

“It’s a nerd convention,” Love says. “It was cool to be around other people who are nerds and where nerds are actually celebrated.”

The meeting began with a video tribute to Buffett filled with clips from the previous 60 years of annual meetings.

The retrospective also served as a reminder of the absence of Charlie Munger, Buffett’s long time vice chairman and intellectual partner, who died in 2023 at age 99.

During his long tenure as CEO, Buffett transformed Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textile manufacturer into a sprawling conglomerate valued at more than $1 trillion, with holdings that span insurance, railroads, energy, retail and some of the world’s largest public companies, including Apple and Coca-Cola.

Along the way, Buffett built a reputation not only for extraordinary investment returns, but also for a disciplined, deeply rational approach to business that reshaped modern investing.

For generations of investors, Buffett, 95, is also a trusted teacher. His annual shareholder letters delivered advice on investing and business explained in plain English.

“I write for people like my sisters,” he told the Journal in 2016. “They’re smart, they read a lot, they have a lot invested in the company. They don’t know all the financial jargon, but they don’t want to be treated like 5-year-olds.”

It’s a skill Love has long admired.

“Buffett does an incredible job of taking extremely complicated things and making them very easy to understand,” he says.

In fact, when Love turned 18 and was allowed to open a brokerage account, Berkshire Hathway is one of the first stocks he bought.

“I’ve always loved the way that he thinks about the world, including his obsession with ultra-long-term compounding,” Love adds. “Buffett is the ultimate contrarian,  symbolized by his location thousands of miles away from Wall Street. He never strays from his very principled way of investing.”

That emphasis on temperament and independent thinking is central to Buffett’s enduring appeal, says Rodney Sullivan, executive director of the Mayo Center, who accompanied students on the trip.

“Buffett’s legacy is as much about clarity and temperament as it is about returns,” Sullivan says. “Buffett married a clear investing philosophy with an unusually effective way of teaching it. He kept bringing people back to first principles: the difference between investing and trading, the discipline of valuing a business rather than predicting a stock price, and the patience to let compounding do the heavy lifting.”

He also taught a practical view of risk — seeking opportunities where the upside is meaningful and the downside is limited — and then having the conviction to hold through noise, Sullivan adds.

“His line, ‘Whether it’s stocks or socks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down,’ captures that mindset perfectly,” says Sullivan.

For some students, the trip also reinforced themes central to Darden’s emphasis on responsible leadership and stakeholder theory.

Nathan Ingram (MBA ’26) was struck by a video clip played during the meeting from Buffett’s 1991 testimony following the Salomon Brothers scandal: “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”

Ingram says the fact that the clip was played 35 years later speaks to its importance for the firm going forward.

“The same investors who would say they like that Berkshire Hathaway is focused on generating returns will also say they like that they do things the right way and treat people well,” he writes on Substack. “The Berkshire ethos Warren Buffett built into the firm comes by pursuing them together.”

In an era dominated by meme stocks, cryptocurrency speculation and relentless market headlines, Buffett’s message still lands with some younger investors.

“He resonates because he offers a stable framework in a market that often rewards noise,” Sullivan says. “Buffett makes the process feel simple — buy good businesses at sensible prices, think long-term — but he also emphasizes that ‘simple’ isn’t the same as ‘easy.’ For students surrounded by hype, that combination is grounding: a decision process they can defend, an approach for thinking about risk, and a reminder that the real edge is temperament — patience, humility and consistency —more than speed.”

Love echoes that sentiment, describing Buffett as a “beacon of reason.” “Any time the entire world agrees on something, it’s probably a good idea to think about the other side of that.”

For Sullivan, Omaha offers lessons that can’t fully be replicated in a classroom.

“Attending the Berkshire annual meeting makes the craft feel real in a way a classroom can’t,” he says. “You see what intellectual seriousness looks like over decades — curiosity, careful reasoning and a willingness to revise views when facts change.”

Students also witness the remarkable community Buffett built around those ideas: roughly 40,000 shareholders from around the globe gathering not simply to celebrate wealth, but also to celebrate long-term investing.

“The positive energy is palpable,” Sullivan says. “Students leave with a clearer sense of what lifelong learning looks like in practice — read widely, think carefully and actively seek out viewpoints that challenge your own.”

For Love, Buffett’s greatest lesson may ultimately be his simplest.

“There’ll never be a substitute for a great business with solid fundamentals,” he says.