All business

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Four Chicago GSB students battled a team from UCLA on CNBC's business game show “Fast Money MBA Challenge” on August 8. Eight teams of business-school students compete for $200,000, to be shared for educational expenses. The teams were seeded according to their 2007 U.S. News and World Report business-school ranking: MIT (4) vs. University of Texas at Austin (18), Chicago (5) vs. UCLA (16), Dartmouth (7) vs. Yale (14), and Columbia (9) vs. NYU (10).

Despite keeping a close game up to the last question, Chicago’s contingent of first- and second-years—Jeremy Crow, Fergus McKay, Ryan Preclaw, and Sabrina Thong—came up short against the Californians’ ability to answer trivia questions such as, “Which company’s private label brands include ‘365 Organic?’” The answer: Whole Foods. "The questions in the initial rounds weren’t too difficult, but we weren’t fast enough on the buzzer," McKay reflected. "I also think we played it a little too conservatively at the beginning, and we should have been more confident in our answers." UCLA lost to Yale in the following match. A number of early upsets have marked the show—besides Chicago’s loss, MIT fell to Texas and Yale defeated Dartmouth.

Texas and Yale go head-to-head in the championship round tonight.

Ethan Frenchman, '08

Photo: A bracket shows the schools' progress toward game-show glory.

August 22, 2007