Goizueta Business School Team wins Fisher Biz Quiz at Ohio State

Goizueta Brings Home the Gold

The Goizueta Business School BBA Team of Daniel Demers, Shawn Shivalkar  and Matej Varga won the fourth annual Nationwide Fisher Biz Quiz at Ohio State University on November 8, 2009.

Eighteen student teams from business schools across the country participated  in an intense competition, in three rounds, answering progressively more complex and detailed questions from articles appearing in The Wall Street Journal in the six weeks prior to the competition. This is Goizueta's third year of participation in this exciting competition and our second championship.

The competition also included three individual written quiz rounds. Questions for these rounds are drawn from the Marketplace section, the Money and Investing section, and the Personal Journal section. Team Goizueta, coached and led by Celeta Vanderpool, and co-coached and prepared by Lee Pasackow, proved unbeatable in this phase as well, turning in 2 first place finishes and a second place finish.

Matej Varga reflects on the team’s preparation and strategy

Our team put in 10-15 hours of work a week, for seven weeks, prior to the competition. Besides thoroughly reading the journal, we summarized and quizzed each other on the articles.

Once we knew all the answers, the trick was to figure out the questions. In the preliminary rounds, we buzzed in for every question we thought we knew. Later rounds penalized false answers, and the questions were hard to guess. Our strategy was not to respond until we heard a distinct interrogative pronoun (i.e."Who...") and always confer with the team, even if we were 100% sure.

As a Woodruff Scholar, I fulfilled a strong desire to represent the school. It was not just about winning, but also about being friendly, polite, and dominating every other team by a 20-50% point margin.

Most of the time, we were calm and confident thanks to our superior preparation; the anxious sighs came from teams keeping their fingers crossed to get placed outside of Emory's semifinal bracket.

The one time we were flustered was when a team buzzed in for every question, hoping to guess a general answer and argue about it with the jury. One such question was when the DJI first crossed the 10,000-point threshold. We knew it was 1999, during the tech boom, but the other team buzzed in first. Daniel turned to us and whispered, "It's either 2003 or 2006..." It worked! The eavesdropping team answered "2003" and lost points.

Overall 1st place team
4th Annual Nationwide Fisher Biz Quiz Competition
AND Individual round winners

Daniel Demers
BBA Senior
1st place, Marketplace

Matej Varga
BBA Senior
1st place, Personal Journal

Shawn Shivalkar
BBA Junior
2nd place, Money and Investing

Coach: Celeta Vanderpool, Co-Coach: Lee Pasackow