A team of three McIntire students—Aditya Bindra (McIntire ’18), Anna Venetianer (McIntire ’19), and Donny Waymire (McIntire ’19)—placed first in this year’s Darden @ Virginia Investing Challenge (DVIC) Nov. 9, 2017, taking home a prize of $3,000. The winning team was the only undergraduate team among 12 others, which came from M.B.A. programs from around the country, including the highly ranked Darden School of Business, Cornell, University of Chicago, NYU, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, The University of North Carolina, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale.
DVIC, hosted by the Darden Capital Management club, selects a key theme for the conference to frame each school’s stock pitch. This year, the theme focused on investment opportunities in the struggling retail space. Providing an ideal training ground for students interested in the investment management profession, the challenge allows students to practice their stock-pitching skills in front of judges from the investment management industry and provides a forum for recruitment and knowledge sharing, particularly as UVIC brings together nearly 500 investment professionals, recruiters, and students each year.
“McIntire is extremely proud of Aditya, Anna, and Donny’s extraordinary achievement,” says McIntire Finance Professor David C. Smith. “Their performance is all the more impressive when you take into account that these undergraduate students competed against M.B.A. students from top schools around the country. The competition was a wonderful opportunity for them to use the skills they’ve been honing in the McIntire curriculum to engage in real-world investment pitches at a high level.”
