Viewed from just about any angle, the College Fed Challenge is a daunting prospect.
Each year, more than 100 teams of three to five students take part in the competition,
which is conducted by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
In taking the challenge, team members assume the roles of Federal Open Market Committee
members, analyzing real-time economic conditions, then making a 15-minute video presentation
in which they suggest their own strategic monetary policy, which they must support
with careful research and independent analysis.
The videos are then judged by actual Fed economists from regional District Banks –
in Radford’s case, that was Richmond, which received 23 submissions last year – and
from there, three regional finalists advance to a national round. Ultimately, only
one winning team is chosen from across the entire country.
In other words, anyone taking part simply for the thrill of victory faces an extremely
slim chance of getting that recognition.
But Radford’s latest competitors found that the challenge offers rewards that are
much more valuable.
“It has been a great learning experience for me,” said Forest Kay, a senior accounting
and finance major from Iron Gate, Virginia, who chaired this year’s Highlander Fed
Challenge team.
“You’re going through current data and conditions and analyzing all that to come up
with decisions and recommendations, and you have to back that with your data and make
a good presentation out of that. And you have to do it as a team,” Kay said.
“Every year has been a learning experience for us, and we've been trying to do better
each and every year,” he explained.
Kay just ran his final Fed Challenge race – he’s graduating in May, has already obtained
a job as an auditor for PBMares Wealth Management and ultimately hopes to earn his
CPA license and become a public accountant – but in his remaining time here, he’s
helping to bolster his successors’ efforts.
“We’re starting in the spring now, seeing if we can get something of a team assembled
and some base format figured out for the next presentation,” he explained.
On Feb. 9, the group took a considerable step toward that goal when it traveled to
Washington, D.C., for the Fed Challenge Open House. The event, which just marked the
competition’s 20th anniversary, was held at the William McChesney Martin Jr. Building,
named after the former Federal Reserve Board chairman.
The daylong open house acts as an epilogue to the competition and offered question-and-answer
panels with both judges and former competitors as well as a keynote address, “Finetuning
Your Presentation,” by economist Graham Long, formerly of the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York.
“That was very helpful because they gave us lots of tips on how to do better,” said
senior economics major Jacob Fadool of South Hill, Virginia. He learned that judges
aren't necessarily looking to teams to predict the future with their presentations
so much as to deliver their best and most educated guesses.
“They don’t really care about your recommendation as long as you've done good work
to support it,” Fadool noted.
“There aren't many courses that teach you the things that we learned from doing the
College Fed Challenge,” he said. “It was a great experience.”
Senior Jeff Moore, junior Addison Howard and sophomores Zachary Kwiatkowski and Bryan
Pomerantz were also members of this year’s team.
Assistant Professor of Economics Jennifer Elias, the team’s faculty sponsor, said
students also got opportunities to talk to current staff members about how the Fed
works, as well as their day-to-day experiences and their career paths for getting
where they are.
“The highlight, at least for me, was meeting the actual chair of the Federal Reserve,
Jerome Powell,” who posed for pictures with the Highlander team, Elias said. “It was
a really fantastic experience for everyone.”
She now hopes to recruit more team members for the next College Fed Challenge and
said the competition is open to more than just business students.
“We've had a physics major. History, computer science, lots of different majors in
the past,” Elias said.
“We’re open to anyone who wants to participate. You just have to be interested in
economics.”
Students interested in taking part this year should contact Elias at Jsobotka@radford.edu
or 540-497-4647.
