Harding’s College of Business Administration is sending its fourth team to this year’s Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute Research Challenge. The challenge is a competition in which university students from around the world work in teams to analyze publicly traded companies by using available information and through face-to-face meetings with company management.

Assistant professor Ken Moran said the competition began with a kick-off in September when teams found out which company they would be working with. According to Moran, this year’s finance team consists of all new members, including seniors Ian Park, Randy Preslar, Anna Ruhl, Midory Martinez and Sara Webb and is responsible for compiling and presenting a financial analysis of FedEx. The team will use most of the fall semester to prepare for the first stage of the competition at the Mid-South Regional Competition, which will be held on Feb. 21, 2015 at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn. The winning team will then advance to the regional competition in Atlanta, and the winning team of that competition will advance to the global final in Singapore.

“It’s hard to express how big this really is,” Moran said. “This is not a regional or state competition or even national competition. It’s an international competition and it’s unbelievable practice. The final is usually in places like Singapore and London — it’s all expenses paid if you get that far. But even before a team like ours can get that far, the world is divided into four regions, and we are in the Americas. So almost right off the bat we could compete with teams from North and South America and Central America, schools in Canada, Brazil and Chile.”

Moran said that although the team came in third place during last year’s district tournament, the first two years Harding sent a finance team, they won their district competitions and advanced on to those years’ regional competitions in New York City and Toronto, respectively.

“Even though our teams didn’t win the regional competitions, they both finished in or better than the top 16 teams out of 47 (districts),” Moran said. “We were beating out MBA programs from Harvard, Yale (and) Columbia. Harding’s undergraduate beating out their graduate programs has really said a lot about the program.”

Ruhl said that because of the high level of competition, getting on the team is a fairly competitive process that involves a formal application process and a scripted presentation in front of professors.

“When you’re interviewing, they want to know how you have applied what you’ve been learning,” Ruhl said. “Now it seems like people really focus a lot on personality and how you fit into a culture, but you have to be able to back up yourself and your resume and show what you know.”

Webb said the competition is a great chance for members to shine in areas they excel in and to grow and benefit from working with a team in areas they are less comfortable in.

“This is also about getting yourself out of your comfort zone,” Webb said. “There are pieces of this challenge that play to each of our strengths and there are pieces of it that don’t. That’s why we have each other, like some of us are really good at valuation and some of us are good at other things. It’s a chance to cross over those segments and learn about each of them hands-on outside of a classroom setting.”