As a Political Science student who chose the field after two years of volunteering at hackathons as a Soylent protector, a 3D printer problem diagnoser, and a person to rant to, what happened at my first case competition was surprisingly confusing—to say the least. Are you getting ready for your first “case comp,” or confused over the sudden barrage of “I have had the great honor of participating in” posts on LinkedIn? This is the three-part anatomy of a case competition:
1) The Calm Before the Storm
You have arranged yourself into a group of four that speaks more about past case competitions than the problem at hand. Your meetings at coffee shops and in living rooms consist of many motivational blurbs. The atmosphere is tense at first but turns into resignation about one day before the competition. Team members are exhausted by the “vague” instructions and burdened by the “unreconcilable” differences in perspectives on a proposed solution. The person in charge of the “finances” is exhausted and pulls numbers out of thin air to finish a bar chart. Someone is scaling the web for the “perfect font and color combo.” You leave the apartment to buy a pizza “downstairs,” posing as a productive team player in this dire time of need. In truth, you take a long walk with a vague notion of where the pizza shop is. You eventually return with an overpriced pizza. Your team stays up until 3 am to put every slide together. Plans to run through the slides have been postponed, taking place during Uber ride to the competition venue next morning.
2) The Battle
Your team has arrived after running through the slides at double speed in the car. You are late, but luckily: the schedule has been pushed back 30 minutes to account for people like you. Name tags are picked up and “what are your plans for the summer” are promptly exchanged with the commerce kids you run into. Someone inevitably mentions that he is currently working an unpaid internship trading stocks for “experience.” You pick up a bagel at the breakfast station standing on two foldaway tables. A small peanut gang has formed around one of the judges. He appears to be speaking about the viability of artificial intelligence in trading.
The two presentations in the morning are sandwiched between a period of angst and reflection. This is the most tedious part of the case competition, as it consists of a lot of small talk started to distract from the anxiety. Some other groups like to float around asking other groups “how they did.” Those other groups inevitably answer with “we think it was okay, one judge really hammered us with tough questions on our finances.” A minority of this time is spent revising the previous presentation to make it more polished for the next.
The final round happens after lunch. Body odour starts to mingle with the aroma of food in the air, thereby increasing the discomfort characteristic of a case competition. Finalists go up to present once more, one by one in front of a longer panel of judges and every team this time around. If you are up there, then you must suppress the desire to scream at the people who are playing with their phones in the audience. Your team’s excellence in the art of mic-passing will also be tested on stage. The goal is to minimize the time spent passing the mic over in order to remove the distraction that follows shuffling around, and to fit as many words as possible into
your ten-minute bracket. The logic is as follows: speak more during the presentation to dodge questions about specifics later.
Much later, the awards are presented to the top teams. A third of the teams leave soon after learning they have not been selected for a final presentation. The other third leaves after the awards have been announced. The third that remains congratulates the emergent victors. If your team placed third or second, someone will come and make the case for how you should have won. Someone makes a beeline to the judges’ table, asking to LinkedIn connect. Everyone else realizes what a good idea this is and does the same.
3) Recovery
The experience has been massively exhausting. Your groupmates will have uploaded the judges’ names into a group chat, so that everyone can LinkedIn connect as promised. You muster whatever energy you have left to like the posts relating to the competition that flood your LinkedIn feed. In the days to follow, your team plans another case competition to attend. The case competition lifestyle is addictive, according to them. How is anyone going to get that shiny Bain internship without having attended every competition to make every possible LinkedIn connection, anyway?
Comments are closed.