Five Boise State Career Track MBA students were named champions of the CFA Institute Global Investment Research Challenge (GIRC) yesterday. The GIRC is an annual competition that provides university students with hands-on mentoring and intensive training in financial analysis. Students work in teams to research and analyze a publicly traded company, The Boise State team worked on Boise Cascade. The team members were Jackie Presnell, Nickie Li, Brady Lawrence, Ken Mazur, AND Ebo Makinde. Professor Keith Harvey served as faculty mentor.
Each team writes a research report on their assigned company with a buy, sell, or hold recommendation, and defends their analysis to a panel of CFA judges. Members of the Boise Cascade management team attended the presentations, along with several CFA’s from the Idaho Society.
This is the second consecutive win for Boise State in the regional competition under the mentorship of Professor Harvey. He commented that “the competition is an incredible learning experience for the students, where the most important lesson is that there’s no substitute for hard work and a team orientation in realizing success. These students worked many late nights, and I couldn’t be more proud of their effort and dedication to one another. The end product is of the same quality you’ll find produced on Wall Street.”
The competition this year consisted of teams from BYU-Idaho, Idaho State University, College of Idaho, and Northwest Nazarene. Boise State’s victory will see the team travel to the Americas competition to be held in Atlanta during April. Indicative of the prestige of the program, CFA Institute will pay airfare, hotel, food and all ancillary expenses for the teams and their faculty mentors to stay for three nights in the luxurious Lowes hotel in downtown Atlanta.