UTC made a big splash an international competition for business students and also hit a milestone for the university.
At the Chartered Financial Analyst Investment Research Challenge, held recently in Boston, UTC’s five-member team—the only all-undergraduate team in the competition—made it into the finals in the Americas Regionals. The students are all members of the College of Business’ SMILE Fund.
The UTC SMILE Fund team is, from left, Kimberly Guo, Hunter Carroll, Shane Cotriss, Heather Edde and Andrew Cox.
The competition matches college students from across the world against each other, all with the goal of creating the best in-depth and results-oriented research on a specific company. With information in hand, each team creates a report with a buy, sell or hold recommendation then presents and defends its choice to a panel of industry professionals.
To make it to the finals, the UTC team won the Americas Regional semifinals by beating five other colleges: University of Waterloo, Seattle University, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Brigham Young University-Idaho and California Polytechnic State University. The University of Waterloo won the America Regionals finals in 2016.
This is the first time a UTC team made it to the Americas Regional finals in the CFA regional competition. They made it to the 2017 regionals but didn’t advance.
In this year’s Americas Regional finals, the UTC team faced Jacksonville University, Marquette University, Universidad del Pacifico, and Tufts University. Jacksonville University won the finals and is going to the Global Finals that start April 27 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
“It was truly a team effort to make it as far as we did. As the only all-undergraduate team that made it to the final round it was amazing. I could not be more proud of the team,” says team member Shane Cortiss.
“It also helps us students see how much we can learn when applying everything from our classes and the SMILE Fund. It also shows we are getting a great education in the College of Business when we can compete with MBA students and beat them,” he adds.
More than 5,000 students representing over 1,000 teams from universities in more than 80 countries took part in the 2018 CFA competition. In the Americas Regional, 440 universities competed with 54 making it to the semifinals.
To reach the Boston competition, the UTC team won the Greater Tennessee Regional Challenge. Seven teams were in the Tennessee Regional, including Belmont University, Eastern Tennessee State University, University of Evansville, Austin Peay State University and the University of Tennessee Challenge.
The UTC team’s presentation was livestreamed. Watch it at:
