It’s one thing to say Warren Buffett is your investment guru. It’s another thing entirely when a fund’s success piques the Sage of Omaha’s interest enough for him to invite you in for a meeting.

And that’s just what happened with the student directors of Global Platinum Securities, the only intercollegiate fund in the nation in which students invest their own money and conduct their own research.

The fund directors are still pinching themselves following last fall’s summit with Mr. Buffett at his offices. Their $250,000 fund, which until recently continued to beat the S&P 500 and several other benchmark indexes, is all about long equity, an aspect of Mr. Buffett’s praise.

But so is the fact that most of the people running GPS are still in college. To be sure, investment clubs are a dime a dozen. But not ones that use real money and are so successful that its founders are now trying to cope with a new management issue: graduation.

“We’re beginning to realize that we want this fund to continue, so we’re restructuring it to deal with life after college,” said a 2007 Georgetown graduate who now works at Fidelity Investments in Boston, Ken Talanian.

In Mr. Talanian’s case, Fidelity’s rules bar him from investing in other funds, as do most mutual fund employers. With an 8.6% return in 2006, Mr. Talanian and his college buddies are finding ways to structure the ownership and management of Global Platinum Securities in order to keep riding their wave of good fortune.

“It’s not like we charge managerial fees or anything,” Mr. Talanian said. “Our incentive is to see just how good we can do with the fund. We want new students to come in and learn like we did. They have extracurricular activities to juggle, so they can spend only so much time with it.”

Like Mr. Talanian, the first round of students to graduate withdrew their investments to avoid conflicts of interest in the postgraduate world.

Mr. Talanian’s friend at Georgetown, Rufino Mendoza, is a 2003 Stuyvesant High School graduate who got New York City friends at other colleges involved with GPS. The fund now has students at Stanford University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown University, University of Pennsylvania, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Colorado.

They’ve added a chapter at the London School of Economics, whose members deal mostly with international investments and research. “It’s taken a couple of years to really get the ball rolling,” Mr. Mendoza said. “When you’re as conservative as we are with investments, it takes time to deploy your cash.”

Another founder of the fund, Timothy Shannon, points out that the fund is weighted heavily in cash (20%) and lacks telecommunications industry exposure, which was the top-performing sector of last year. Still GPS outperformed the Nasdaq Composite, the Lehman Bond Composite, Fidelity Magellan, and the Hartford Growth Fund.

It is often assumed that college students are more like to invest intuitively in speculative start-ups and unproven technologies. But the members of the GPS fund are as stodgy as a bunch of Omaha housewives when it comes to their investments. They throw around terms like “Lynchian fundamentals” and “buy-and-hold strategy,” which is largely how Mr. Buffett started to take notice.

“We had a 90-minute questionand-answer session with him, and all throughout he touted thorough research and honesty,” Mr. Talanian said. “Another thing he stressed was to choose a strategy and stick with it.”

For the young minds involved with GPS, it’s often tempting to explore sophisticated areas of the capital markets. “We’ve talked about derivatives, but we always have a hard time rationalizing taking that course when it really comes down to it,” he said.

If they weren’t admirable and upright enough, these students are serious about allocating a percentage of the fund’s gains to charity. “That’s one of the toughest parts of the entire operation of the fund,” Mr. Talanian said. “Everyone has a different cause he feels passionately about.”