Competition!

The thing I miss most, or perhaps the only thing I miss about High School is the competition.  I loved the anticipation, stress, and thrill of preparing for ACADEC and FBLA competitions and the success of winning or seeing those on my teams win.  During the past year or two, I haven't really had any opportunity for competition (except maybe in a class project or grades), and have mostly gotten over missing it.  However, winning things, or at least trying to, is not only enjoyable, but also looks pretty good on a resume.

A few weeks ago I learned about an accounting competition for business students -- it wasn't for a class or anything, but was optional and required a mixed team of sophomores and juniors/seniors.  The competition was called PWC xACT and was a case competition put on by PWC, one of the big four accounting firms.  Initially, I didn't want to put in the effort to compete, but when a few people from Eller Ambassadors needed another member for their team, I volunteered to join them. 

Over the past week, we put in a lot of work. Like probably 15-20 hours at least. This is what we had to do:

Each team was given information about a fictional personal care product company that was interested in expanding into the naturals market.  They were considering whether it would be best to build up their own naturals branch from scratch or acquisition another fictional company.  We were provided with some information about the history of the companies, where they were located and manufacturing, and some of their financial statements.  Our job was to act as a PWC consulting team who would research and make a suggestion of which option was the best for the company.  We spent the week researching, putting together a presentation, and practicing.  It took a lot of time (and unfortunately all of us on the team have very busy schedules), but it felt pretty awesome to actually be able to understand the case and put together the information to make an education suggestion.  On Friday morning, after a lot of practicing, a little sleep, and some coffee, my team made a 12 minute videotaped presentation to three PWC employees followed by a question and answer period.  My team happened to be filled with pretty awesome and fairly confident and cocky individuals, so we calmly informed everyone throughout the week that we fully intended to win.  I realized at the end that if we didn't, it was kind of unfortunate that we had spent all of that time on the project.  But of course, you can never be sure.  On Friday afternoon the judges made their final decision, and...... (drum roll)
we actually won!! Yay for being awesome :P  As a reward, we  won $1000 as a team ($200 each) and our video gets submitted to Nationals.  Although it seems highly unlikely that this would occur...the top five finalist actually get an all-expense paid trip to NYC in January to present there!  In addition, all of the finalist teams win $10000!  Unfortunately, we are competing against some pretty awesome schools, but if by some crazy chance we are chosen, we will find out mid November :)

Hope I didn't bore you with my nerdy business excitement!