How our team placed first in the accounting stream of the Eclipse Competition
Hey School of Accounting and Finance (SAF)!
We are Accounting and Financial Management (AFM) students Janvi, Hufsah, Nicole, and Rohun and we are happy to announce that we emerged with a first-place victory in the accounting portion of the Eclipse Case Competition that took place earlier in February!
We are so excited to tell you about our experience at this brand new and all-encompassing case competition hosted by the University of Toronto! Thank you to the enormous number of sponsors that made the competition possible. This new competition gave students the opportunity to compete in four different areas including: technology, project management, sustainability, and accounting.
Our team competed in both the accounting and technology streams of the competition. We were tasked with creating a 10-minute presentation for each case and were given five days to prepare for our technology case and two hours for our accounting case.
For the accounting case, our task was to determine the best possible allocation of costs and revenues for a tennis club’s potential new winter operations, along with suggestions to enhance their customer satisfaction survey. Our group went beyond the expectations by incorporating factual statistics including average historical snowfall and windspeeds to further substantiate our recommendation. This led to a strong qualitative conclusion to end our presentation.
After each presentation, we received both positive feedback and pointers in areas to improve. For example, we performed a sensitivity analysis, however, our judges recommended a break-even analysis to strengthen the presentation further. Coming out of both feedback sessions, our team was feeling uneasy and questioned our performance; none of us really expected to have a chance at winning. Even though we felt the feedback didn’t reflect well, it did not mean that the rest of our presentation, research, and work didn’t hold up well! It’s simply some advice to strengthen our positions for next time!
To our complete shock and surprise, we ended up winning first place out of 20 teams in the accounting stream! One of our biggest takeaways from the day was that constructive feedback is a valuable tool that we can leverage. Through implementing some of the points from our first case, we were able to further refine our second presentation.
This competition enabled us to refine our problem-solving, research, and presentation skills as well as the ability to think on our feet! We were able to apply our learnings and skills from SAF to the cases presented. Through effective collaboration and communication within the team, we were able to create strong recommendations that leveraged our market research and creativity. We highly recommend that students participate in competitions like Eclipse which enable students to collaborate and build upon skills that can’t be refined otherwise. Not only is it fun, but it is an awesome way to meet some new friends!