A team of undergraduate Finance students from the David Eccles School of Business recently made a splash in the CFA Institute Research Challenge, competing with teams from more than 800 universities from around the world and landing in the top 20 teams for all of North and South America.

The feat was all the more impressive considering the team representing the U—junior Alex Schaaf, senior Alex Wall, senior Bryce Whiting, senior Benton Sturt and junior Jacob Clark—was mostly competing against teams of MBA students, including winning the Utah state competition to move on to the Americas battle in Colorado.

The team members figure they spent about 1,500 collective hours working on the competition beginning in November, including long days, nights and weekends holed up together or separately researching different aspects of the company they were assigned, Extra Space Storage, Inc. , a self-storage Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) headquartered in Salt Lake City. “I saw them hard at work in the trading room when I got out of class at 10 p.m., and weekend mornings,” said Dr. Elizabeth Tashjian, the team’s faculty advisor. “They ordered arcane books on the industry, and taught themselves about REITs.”

The competition involved creating both a written report and giving a presentation to a panel of industry professionals. As Whiting described it, the report was quite a task, a 42-page document that included valuation methods, estimated share price, strengths and weaknesses of the company and the industry, historical trends, statistical analysis, forecasts and other analyses. After the team wrangled the written report into shape, they had to train for a 10-minute live presentation, followed by an intense Q&A session. And while the team members had individual responsibilities, they all said the collaboration during the months of preparation got them all up to speed on every aspect they needed.

“It was the group conversations about each other’s sections and questions that I feel we really gained an advantage over the other schools,” said Whiting. “The countless hours we spent conversing about even the smallest aspects of the company and industry is what gave us the confidence we needed to answer any question the CFA panel would throw at us.”

Sturt noted that the team’s early preparation back in November proved invaluable in getting the team to the national stage.

“Our success was enhanced by the fact we got started very early and began to ask the difficult questions very early on,” Sturt said. “Our team was by far the most prepared for the company meeting and for communication with the company in the local first round, which was a vital advantage.”

Aside from the satisfaction of a job well done, the team members all see long-term value in both the process of preparing for the competition, and in the high-pressure environment of the competition itself. Sturt, for one, said “participating in the CFA challenge taught me more about understanding and evaluating a company than any other class or competition I’ve been in. For my career, the ability to evaluate a business will be crucial and I plan to leverage much of the knowledge I have gained in this for the rest of my life.”

Schaaf considers the competition “the most valuable experience in my college career. I’ve been able to apply everything I learned in my finance courses. I learned what it takes to be part of a successful team and how to be an effective leader.”

“The CFA Research Challenge has been nothing short of transformative,” Wall concurred. “I began this process five months ago and couldn’t have valued a hot dog stand. Now I’m comfortable conducting equity research on any company in the world.”

Besides building their team through preparation, and working with Tashjian and Industry Mentor Michael Thornton, the team members cited the networking opportunities with both fellow students and finance professionals at the competition as highlights of the experience.

Clark cited “the opportunity to converse and meet several experienced professionals in a variety of different fields within the financial services industry” as one of his trip highlights, one that included networking with industry mentors and other excellent students from “as far south as Panama City, as far east as New York and Rhode Island, and as far north as Alberta, Canada.”

The CFA Institute Research Challenge was truly the kind of hands-on opportunity that enhances a college education in myriad ways. As Clark put it, “the idea of learning by doing was truly the case in this competition.”

“In entering the competition, the majority of us had minimal experience valuing a company,” Clark said. “After ripping through their financials, reading books about REITs, and conducting in-depth research about valuing companies, we were able to become highly proficient in investment research and analysis.”