close window 
A team of five second-year GSB students won first place at the inaugural Energy Finance Challenge at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business September 14–16.
The first-place prize brought $5,000 for team members Rodrigo Fenton, Mayank Jaiswal, Mauricio Molina, John Rhoads, and Erik Waters, all members of the student-run Energy Group.
Teams from 12 top business schools acted as corporate negotiators for “Nomad Petroleum,” a fictional company located in “the Kingdom of Jerbia,” a small, imaginary Pacific island nation. Their task was to propose expansion of an offshore lease to a panel of judges— executives from Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chiron Financial Group, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank—who served either as Nomad’s executive committee or the Jerbian ministries of energy and finance. After the case was distributed, teams had 36 hours to draft a plan, fly to Austin, and present it to the panels.
“We not only put together a set of financial metrics and analysis about competitive regulatory issues, environmental issues, and ethical dilemmas in the case, we also worked seriously on our presentation skills to put together something compelling,” said Molina.
The GSB team put together two business plans, one for company executives and one for government officials—a tactic that likely helped the GSB team take the top spot, he said.
The team stressed the importance of a continued partnership between the oil company and its national government partner, and highlighted the substantial tax and royalty revenue that had been provided in the past. The proposal also recommended Nomad construct a domestic refinery and ethanol plant that would both solve the nation’s dependency on imported refined oil and support the local sugar cane industry.
The team made two presentations, each followed by an intense question-and-answer session.
Competing schools included Harvard Business School, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, MIT Sloan School of Management, University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business, Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, The Johnson School at Cornell University, and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
—Patty Houlihan