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The biggest benefits first-year student Anil Taneja and his teammates got from winning the 2009 JP Morgan M & A Challenge were summer jobs, Taneja said. “In these trying times, that’s pretty impressive,” he said. “I think this competition really helped.”
Taneja’s team – fellow first-years Alexis Tosti, Devin Wilde, Irene Chiao, Mark Linford, and Jonathan J. Anderson – tied for first place with a second Chicago Booth team by topping five other Booth teams and eight from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in the annual competition in early January. Members of the second winning Booth team included first-year students Adam Hunia, Scott Garber, Scott Dworshak, Jim Delaney, Selena Roker, and Jessica Ogbonnaya.
The experience Taneja gained during the grueling two-day event proved invaluable during the recent recruiting period at Booth, he said. “It helped during interviews,” Taneja said. “It was almost a seal of approval that we can handle the work and can work all night.”
More importantly, Taneja got firsthand experience in his preferred sector of banking. “We went through the exercises for 26 hours straight with an hour and a half of sleep,” he said. “You can read about that in a book, but you do not know what it’s like until you actually do it. This gave me an eye for what my life will be like in the next few years.”
In the competition, teams acted as advisors to a special committee to the board of directors of a company that just received a hostile offer from a private equity firm, said Hunia. “The board asked us to give a presentation regarding the company’s options and to recommend a course of action,” he said.
The teams were given 30 hours to prepare a 12-minute PowerPoint presentation from 60 pages of limited financial data, company information, industry information, potential strategic bidders, potential financial sponsor bidders, and capital markets information, Hunia said. They were required to present the following strategic options, he said:
Hunia’s team succeeded by applying Booth thinking to their presentation, Hunia said.
“We did a good job of justifying the assumptions we used in our valuation models and explaining the rationale behind our recommendation,” he said. “Also, the fact that everyone in our group participated in the presentation helped.”
Taneja said adequate preparation for the presentation was crucial to his team’s success. “The recommendations of all of the teams were close within a few dollars,” he said. “It helped us that we spent so much time rehearsing our presentation. We got about an hour of sleep but dedicated an hour and a half to two hours to rehearsing our presentation.”
As a result the team, which featured just one banker among its diverse skill set, sparkled during its 12 minutes in the limelight. “We spoke confidently and were able to answer questions,” Taneja said. “During the question-and-answer session we successfully synthesized some of the information. We were able to interpret data on the spot and parlay it in a concise and structured manner.”
— Phil Rockrohr