Taking the Fork in the Road

Carolyn M. Campora '89

Carolyn Campora leads the sort of life most of us only dream about. A sixth-degree black belt in kung fu, she is the master and owner of a martial arts school in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. She is a master of tai chi, kung fu, and the traditional Eastern healing technique of reiki and teaches businesspeople, professors, architects, artists, writers, and media professionals. A fine artist and former portfolio manager, Campora discovered martial arts three decades ago. The story reads like an illustration of the Yogi Berra maxim, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

"I've lived my life with the idea of travel," says Campora. One day she found herself in Izmir, on the coast of Turkey, where she saw a poster for the interior. She dreamed of traversing the country alone on a horse. But rumors of the white slave trade put the kibosh on that.

If she could defend herself with martial arts, Campora reasoned, she could ride across Turkey. In summer 1973 she started studying martial arts just so she could travel more freely. "But I didn't travel again for ten years, because I was going to class every day." She studied at Nabi Su Martial Arts and Healing Center under Master Pai, a Korean-born "martial-arts genius" whose support meant everything in the nearly all-male school. "He was gender-blind," says Campora, who encountered resentment and even punishment from a few students. But she persevered. After only five years Master Pai made her head teacher.

For Campora the challenges of martial arts paled in comparison to the challenges of business school. While struggling to survive as a painter, Campora had recognized that only the most successful artists made as much as even mediocre bankers. So she applied to the Johnson School and waited. In high school she had dreamed of going to Cornell and had been wait-listed. But a disagreement with her English teacher dropped her GPA and shattered that dream. "So when I got into the Johnson School," she says, "there was joy in River City."

Getting in was the easy part. "I was forty," says Campora. "The median age of my class was twenty-five." Classmates would ask her about the Vietnam War, saying they had read about it in their history books. Campora faced other challenges as well. "I trotted in with my new laptop and didn't know how to open it. I felt like Rip Van Winkle. In New York City I was an opera-going intellectual, an artist and astrologer, an interesting person. At Cornell I was a weirdo." When her economics professor razzed her for practicing astrology, she shot back, "What percentage of the time are you guys right?" He laughed and salaamed.

Countless snappy comebacks later, Campora graduated. She had mainly focused inward up to that point but found that the Johnson School had given her outward focus. "I could meet the world," she says. "I had a Cornell MBA."

In 1989 Campora joined Bank Austria as assistant to the high-yield portfolio manager. Soon she became manager. "Junk bonds were like the Wild West," she says. "I loved it." With the "illness and death" of junk, however, the department was dissolved, and Campora was out of work. At the same time Master Pai announced that he was leaving the city. Nabi Su needed a new master, and in 1992 Campora came to own the school that she loved. In addition to kung fu, tai chi, Zen meditation, and reiki, Campora also practices Holographic Repatterning (HR), which she describes as "psychotherapy via energy work."

Campora helped edit The Encyclopedia of Technical Market Indicators, second edition, written by her husband, Robert Colby, and helped design his investment research Web site (www.robertwcolby.com). She is currently editing an HR book by Eileen Martin and has begun cowriting, with Martin, a book on the astrological archetypes. And she has traveled to exotic places.

What's next? "A spiritual retreat center on vast acreage," says Campora, "location yet to be determined."