Race N Case

Race N Case

Case competitions are often a common experience in business school. Teams from business schools across the country against one another on various topics ranging from finance, strategy, marketing, ethics and other business topics. In most competitions, teams are presented a case and given 24-36 hours to prepare a solution and power point slide deck that is presented to a panel of judges.

The Race N Case competition was slightly different. Hosted by the University of Denver, organizers decided to put their own twist on the competition by dividing into two parts. The first part consisted of the typical case competition, though teams were given a case ahead of time and asked to prepare a slide presentation on a business ethics situation. In our case, an investment fund was forced to decide whether to divest when an investment company did not meet requirements of the fund. In our first presentation we discussed our analysis and recommendations to a panel of 5 judges. In the afternoon we presented to the entire panel of judges (over 30 in total)...

The second part of the competition was a ski race. Saturday morning we all boarded buses (one day late, thanks to high winds which closed I70 for much of Friday) and headed to Vail ski resort. Not only did we get to ski Vail for the day, but we also got to race against the other teams. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into...Though we were all experienced skiers/boarders we could not compete with the likes of UCBoulder, UDenver and BYU...some how the Colorado mountains just don't compare to the Sierra's

In the end, we just barely missed the top three, due to our ski performance, but we all had a great weekend. The competition came to an end on Saturday evening with a catered dinner at a restaurant at the top of the Gondola. Oh, did I mention that we stayed at a Vail resort with its own ski lift...let me tell ya, it gives a whole new meaning to skiing! :) Nothing like waking up and being on the slopes 15 minutes later!

Since we made the journey to Colorado the team decided to take advantage of an extra ski day on Sunday before we all headed back to Berkeley.

I think everyone would agree that it was a great weekend. Check out some picts from Denver, the UDenver campus and Vail!