Welcome back to Campus Chronicles, our weekly look at the b-school campus press. This week we turn our focus to the Wharton Journal at the University of Pennsylvania and to Harvard Business School’s Harbus.
The Wharton Journal was excited to report last week that a team of five MBA students won the Graduate Business School Financial Engineering Competition organized by the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon. The competition included Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Princeton, and Wharton. The seven teams were given a case on commodities and then had to come up with an appropriate financial engineering solution to satisfy the clients’ needs.
The competition was an intense 6-hour exercise during which teams burnt both brain cells and Excel cells to come up with an analysis that involved part structuring, part valuation, and part hedging. In the 11-year history of the competition, Wharton and the Haas School have each won the competition four times.
Another team of Wharton students triumphed at the 3rd Annual Sustainable Venture Capital Investment Competition hosted by the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. This competition was a whirlwind of activity, forcing students to make thoughtful investment decisions in a 24-hour time-span. Teams played the role of venture capitalists, evaluating business ideas using a triple bottom line of financial profitability, environmental integrity, and social equity to determine whom to support. They interviewed the entrepreneurs under the watchful eye of VC judges, and were assessed based on team dynamics, insight into the financials, and rapport with entrepreneurs. Each group of would-be venture capitalists then developed an investment framework, wrote a term sheet, and created a PowerPoint presentation to share their vision for these companies.
In addition to expertise in financial engineering and venture capital, Wharton students this month also brought together a show of their cultural wealth during the eighth annual Wharton International Cultural Show. The audience of 500 was led through the sights and sounds of China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, India, Israel, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Both audience members and participants touted the show as a huge success. Many said they took home a little more knowledge about the true richness of the cultures on campus.
Moving up the coast from Pennsylvania, the Harbus reported that over 300 Harvard Business School students attended the annual HBS Spring Fashion Show. The HBS fashion show was started by the HBS Retail & Apparel club a few years ago. Its goal is to provide a platform for the student body to discover the latest fashion trends, and to dress for internships, swanky weekend events, and everyday glamour throughout the summer. The show’s other purpose is to raise money for a local charity. This year’s grateful recipient was the Boston arm of Dress for Success, which promotes economic independence by providing professional attire and career development support to disadvantaged women.
One big announcement in recent Harbus was that the HBS Class Day committee confirmed Ann Moore, Chairman and CEO of Time Inc., and HBS alumus, as the keynote speaker of this year’s HBS Class Day.
Ann Moore’s many accolades include her recognition as one of Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women in American Business,” a distinction she has earned each year since the list was created in 1999. In addition, Moore was honored last year with the Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award, the school’s highest honor. Moore attended HBS in a time when the class was overwhelming male – she recalls that the women’s bathrooms lacked permanent signs during her time as a student, which served as a constant reminder that she was one of only a handful of females in her graduating class of 1978. Thirty years later, the first-year class at HBS is 36% women, a sizeable increase over past decades.
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