- Which Sports team was originally called “The Boston Red Stockings”?
- X is a 1986 hit song, originally sung by a group from Cameroon. This song was written as a tribute to African soldiers in World War II. In 2010, song Y based on X became a worldwide rage. Name song Y.
- Which business person’s autobiography is titled “Losing my Virginity”?
What connects these questions? Well, all of these were asked at a recent “Quiz” at Goizueta, and the SUPERTEAM had answers to all of them!
The background story leading to this event: Quizzes are basically knowledge-contests that are insanely popular in India. Right from the high-school days leading to the university-levels and even in the corporate world, all schools, and most big companies, have at least one Quiz-team that represents them. I was a very active member of the quiz clubs at my former employers, and, while applying for the MBA program at Goizueta, I had indicated that I wanted to start a Quiz Club at the school. Well, after coming to US, I realized that contests like these have little popularity in US. The closest thing to a quiz is “Trivia night,” and I hate to use that term as it, well, trivializes the intense game that I have been used to. So, instead of forming a full-fledged club, I proposed the idea of having an International Quiz under the banner of International Business Association (IBA). Everyone in the IBA leadership liked the idea, and that’s how “Smartest MBA Challenge” was born.
We worked on the publicity of the event for three weeks, sending out teaser quizzes and advertising the event on Facebook. The response to the teasers was surprisingly better than what I had expected. So, I wasn’t surprised to see a decent turnout, even when many students had a midterm the next day.
We had an elimination round, and the top five teams made it to the finals. The finals consisted of two business rounds (one from US, one from the ‘Rest of the World’), two non-business rounds (one from US, one from the ‘Rest of the World’) and one special round called Passwords. The team of David Gonzales and Jimmy Mitchell, named SUPERTEAM, took the lead right from the first round, and maintained a big margin over the other four teams till the very end. However, the race for the second spot was much more intense. Three teams kept interchanging positions with every passing round. Right before the final question of the final round, two teams were tied at 40 and a third team tallied at 35. Since the final question was worth 10 points (and a negative five if you get it wrong!), the team raising the hand first and answering correctly was going to grab the second spot. As you can see in the picture, one team made it to the second spot by beating another by a split second! I have witnessed many close contests in India, but even I hadn’t expected this photo-finish in the inaugural edition here!!
The final results were:
Winners: Jimmy Mitchel and David Gonzales (Both One-year MBA11)
First Runners-up: Neil Sullivan and Michael Freedman-Aponte (Both Two-year MBA11)
Second Runners-up: Rohit Bhandari and Ankit Joshi (Both Two-year MBA12)
Congratulations to the winners and other participants! I hope that the event becomes an annual event at Goizueta!
By the way, if you are interested, the answers to the questions at the start of this post are: Atlanta Braves, Waka Waka, and Richard Branson! If you want to try out more questions from the quiz, you can find them on my personal blog here.
Read the full article: Smartest MBA Challenge: A “Quiz” at Goizueta