Jim Cramer descends through the crowd at Conte. Photograph: Justin Knight

At 2:00 on the afternoon of September 20, two hours before a television shoot was scheduled to begin in Conte Forum, a boisterous crowd of students gathered in the mezzanine. Some shook pom-poms, some waved giant red foam fingers, others wore golden Superfan T-shirts; one student arrived with a dollar sign painted in maroon and gold on his cheek. “Booyah, Baby!” a young man in a dark blue blazer and tie shouted as he traded a high five (sort of) with the hoof of a roving bull mascot on whose red furry chest a dollar sign was sewn. “We’re here to make Mad Money!”

Mad Money is the CNBC cable television show hosted by Jim Cramer, the investment analyst and markets commentator known for his kinetic loudmouth style and ready stock advice. Though the show is usually shot without an audience in a studio at CNBC’s New Jersey headquarters (with Cramer taking stock-market questions from callers), in September the hyper TV host went on the road to selected college campuses, kicking off his second annual “Back to School Tour” at Boston College (second stop, Georgetown University). Facilitated by the Office of Public Affairs and the Carroll School of Management, Cramer’s appearance drew an audience from across the BC campus, but the lion’s share were CSOM students. Seven CSOM student volunteers (the first to answer a CNBC e-mail inquiry over the summer) served as advance staff, managing the event’s marketing, publicity, ticketing, and logistics, coordinating with CNBC and BC. The 400 tickets allotted for the free taping were snatched up weeks beforehand; according to a CNBC representative, more than 1,000 people e-mailed to request seats.

The former manager of a $450-million hedge fund (Cramer Berkowitz, which, according to BusinessWeek, in 2000 outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index by 38 percentage points), Cramer has built a nightly audience approaching 400,000 in the one year that Mad Money has been on the air. He’s done this by leaping around the stage, throwing chairs, ripping the heads off toy figurines, shouting trademark macho catchphrases like “Booyah,” exhorting his viewers to “buy, buy, buy” (while pointing into the camera), and making stock recommendations that can send market values upward just by his backing.

“He captures the energy you find on the trading floor,” said Graham Gullans ’07, a finance and information systems double major interviewed as he waited to enter the arena. Gullans, who carried a handmade yellow cardboard sign with the phrase “I’m writing my thesis on UPL”—Ultra Petroleum Corporation—scrawled in green Magic Marker, tries not to miss the show, which airs three times every weekday night at 6 p.m., 9 p.m., and midnight; for many students at the Carroll School, he said, Mad Money has become a daily talking point.

“Cramer is always a little ahead of the curve,” said Ryan Morrissey ’07, an event volunteer and a finance and marketing major hoping to go into investment banking or private wealth management. When the real estate market was booming, Morrissey said, many people invested in property development companies; Cramer pushed stock in boom-beneficiary industries, like Home Depot and construction outfits. “Cramer made a lot of people rich,” said Morrissey. (The claim is debated in the industry press. Cramer’s television forays have been dismissed as “comic relief” in Barron’s; BusinessWeek reported last fall that his “Picks of the Week” bested the Dow Jones industrial average by 700 percent after three months.)

For CSOM, the taping may also have been a stock boost. “It’s great to have one of the most visible market pundits come to campus,” said Professor Michael Barry, chairman of the finance department. This year, finance became the second most popular major at BC, with 805 students (following communication, with 945). With CSOM at Number 23 in BusinessWeek’s rankings of undergraduate business schools, said Barry, “we’re a school that’s doing well and is on the rise.” Hosting Mad Money only “adds to the momentum CSOM has built.”

The makeshift studio assembled in a corner of the arena floor contained many of the elements familiar to Mad Money viewers: a desk (fronted, for this taping, by BC banners) a collapsible canvas chair (never sat in, but available to be thrown), and behind the desk, hanging from a backdrop, a stately oil painting of Cramer. Nearly covering the desk were an array of Cramer look-alike bobblehead dolls and colorful fist-size bull and bear foam figurines, which Cramer threw at clamoring audience members during commercial breaks.

By 3:30, the audience had filed in, and when Cramer, wearing a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a maroon tie with a dazzling field of BC Eagle logos, ran down from the stands a half-hour later, the students erupted into cheers, hoots, and whistles. “Booyah!” Cramer shouted as he charged to the stage through a web of extended hands and waving foam fingers, throwing air-punches to the crowd. At the first commercial break, he addressed the audience sternly as if he were a coach focusing his team—“I need you to be in the game if I’m gonna deliver”—and when the show resumed, the crowd cheered again, at a higher decibel.

Although he stayed true to his usual format, standing up and yelling investment advice into the fish-eye lens of a Steadicam, Cramer geared entire segments to the live BC audience. He pressed its members to “get in the game today” and open up a brokerage account (“I do not want to hear how you can’t afford it,” Cramer said, pounding a button on his panel of sound effects that played a baby’s cry); and he recommended specific stocks, including Google, Goldman Sachs, and Sears Holdings.

In a telephone interview a few days before the taping, Cramer talked about his antics. “This is not a business show, this is an entertainment show about business,” he said in the same aggressive tone he uses on television. Students, according to Cramer, are the most important demographic to reach; “the average guy says ‘I can’t figure [the stock market] out,’ which was fine when employers looked out for employees’ futures.” Now, he said, “We are in a Dickensian moment. No one is looking out for the workers.”

To hook young viewers and keep them watching, Cramer said, he gives them a product they can enjoy regardless of their interest in finance. Then, he said, “we get them directly involved.” Rather than taking questions from callers during his “lightning round,” he invited students to test his encyclopedic knowledge of current stocks. Mike Gualtieri ’08, a communication major, earned a “buy, buy, buy” sound effect when he asked about stock in the X-ray company Dentsply; Charlie Ellinwood, a freshman who greeted Cramer with a hearty “B-B-B-Booyah,” received a bellowing bull sound effect when he asked about Lehman Brothers; communication major Holley Mesuda ’09 caught a football Cramer threw at her unexpectedly after she asked about Wells Fargo, his “favorite bank stock.”

“If I can do this, anyone can do it,” said Cramer to the cheering fans, slamming another sound effect button to release the “ca-ching” of a cash register. “I was living in the back seat of my 1977 Ford Fairmont on Interstate 5 . . . smelling like a goat and covering it up with baby powder and I was still able to put a few hundred smackers into the Fidelity Magellan Fund,” he told the audience at one point, sharing a familiar tale from his twenties. When the show aired later that night, a pop-up graphic on the screen read, “I still use baby powder but I no longer smell like an animal.”

Eleven students made it onto the BC episode, while nearly as many waited fruitlessly off camera. Conspicuously absent from the queue were the relatively few older audience members, most of whom had been seated by the crew in the back and side rows, out of the cameras’ range.

“I was impressed with the students’ questions,” said Lou Corsini, an associate professor of accounting and one of a handful of faculty in attendance. He’d noticed the taping advertised around campus, he said, and as an occasional Mad Money viewer (“I can’t watch the show every night,” he confessed, “sometimes not even the whole show”), he came to see the students interact with Cramer. “They asked questions an informed investor might ask,” he said, “which leads me to believe a lot of them may already be playing the market.”

“I think the students surprised even Cramer,” said Ken Schwartz, an associate professor of accounting also in the audience. “They asked about some small businesses with sparse analyst coverage” and prompted insightful tips (for example, “movies won’t make you rich, video games will”), along with the “slew of annoying sound effects,” noted Schwartz.

“I’m about having fun,” Cramer said in his telephone interview, “I’d wear a diaper in a sandbox if it would get people interested in the market.” His greatest reward, he said, isn’t making people rich, but showing them that it’s possible. “This is the greatest game in the world,” he said, “and everybody in this country has a chance to play.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg