As Wall Street becomes Main Street with increased public interest in the fluctuating stock market and the rise of amateur day traders, comes the need for students to be stock savvy.

To meet this growing need, The Smeal College of Business Administration has planned to build a state-of-the-art trading room.

Known as the Smeal College Trading Room, the room will function as a laboratory facility and classroom, with a simulated trading environment.

"The Smeal College Trading Room is a vital link between classroom learning and business practice," said Judy Olian, Dean of Smeal College, in a press release. "It is a bridge between the classroom and the financial markets. It will give students live experience to the nerve-racking world of trading, risk management, exposure that prepares them from day one for careers."

Scheduled to be finished in April of this year and located on the second floor of the Business Administration Building, the idea for the Trading Room was started years ago.

"The idea started six or seven years ago," said Randall Woolridge, professor of finance in the Smeal College of Business. "A couple of schools started moving in this direction, putting trading rooms in their schools, and I thought we should have one here."

Penn State will join with other universities who have simulation trading rooms, such as Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell.

The room will be equipped as a true Wall Street trading room and will include live coverage of financial markets from CNBC and CNN and data feeds from Reuters, Xtra, Bloomberg, Firstcall and Datastream. There will be three display boards running stock quotations on a continuous feed and nearly 44 trading stations, each equipped with computer screens providing data feeds from multiple sources. There are also plans for a multipurpose lab, a systems office and a student lounge area.

Sky Technologies, a New York based company which builds trading rooms for Wall Street, is designing the Smeal Trading Room.

All of this is the result of more than $1 million in contributions from Penn State alumnus J. David Rogers, Managing Director/Equities Trading at Goldman Sachs & Co. in New York City.

"I'm happy to be a part of giving something back to the University and this to me was the most tangible way to do this. This is what I do everyday, I trade," Rogers said in a press release.

"This will improve students' capabilities in the field of markets, trading, sales, research and analysis."

Rogers' contributions and additional fund-raising will help support the room's construction and ongoing operation.

Though the room will be used for some classes, Woolridge sees the room being used for more finance projects than classes.

"You will have access to data sources you wouldn't normally have access to. It's a research lab," Woolridge said. "Just like when you read about doing something in a chemistry class and then go to a chemistry lab and do what you just read about, finance students can do the same. Instead of a chemistry lab, it's a finance lab."

Because both faculty and students must receive an orientation to the lab, it probably won't be used for classes until fall semester, summer session at the earliest Woolridge said.

Until then, Woolridge will be hiring students to work in the lab and help other students who want to take advantage of the resources offered.

"It's a great experience for someone who wants to work on Wall Street," Woolridge said.