We won! Yay! More explaination. Paul, Eden and I competed on behalf of Goizueta Business School at the 2007 Nationwide Fisher Biz Quiz Competition, hosted by Ohio State University. It’s a quiz bowl-type competition with preliminaries, semi-finals and a televised (local station, of course) finals round. Basically, we’re assigned to read the Wall Street Journal for seven weeks and then we face off against other schools. I’ve actually worked with Paul and Eden before; we all did the Georgetown case competition together last semester along with Minnie.

Anyway, I think a lot of things were working to my advantage this weekend. For starters, Ohio State is actually my dad’s alma mater, so that’s clearly automatic luck right there. Also, I am in love with the Wall Street Journal, so that’s a no-brainer, too. In the end, Emory took home first place wins in both the individual and team competitions. We’re happy, but also relieved that we don’t get lynched by the mob that is the Goizueta administrators. Our Ohio State host was also wonderful.

Basically, we decided to divvy up all the articles by section. Because I got Marketplace, Pursuits, Weekend Journal and Personal Journal, I was also responsible for the individual competition, which is over the Personal Journal. Eden was Front Page and global What’s News. Paul was Money & Investing and domestic What’s News. In all honestly, I think my job was the easiest, both in subject matter and the sheer number of articles, though I think doing the investing section would have been very helpful.

All in all, it was a great weekend. The teams were all really nice, though the competition was decidedly male-heavy, clearly a lot of finance majors. Paul and Eden were really helpful to work with — I think we learned more explaining concepts and things to one another — usually, them explaining and me listening — than from the articles themselves. (Anyone want to know what a Ponzi scheme is? I can talk about it all day.)

We had fun (in a dorky way), but they both also gave me a lot of advice on pursuing jobs in finance, which helped me see what I was doing wrong or how to better tailor myself for the job search. They’ve both got jobs/offers at top investment banks, so they’re clearly set. Anyhow, I feel pretty read to get back out there and conquer the job search, which I have been avoiding the past month.