She Counts! Foster Students Win AT&T’s Virtual Finance MBA Case Competition
Foster’s very own Christine Pham and Xianjin Cai (both FT MBA 2022) recently took first place at the She Counts Finance Competition hosted by AT&T!
AT&T has a strong Finance Leadership Development Program (FLDP) to help finance professionals sharpen their skills. In order to help students reveal their full potential and demonstrate gender equity, AT&T launched their She Counts Virtual Finance MBA/MS Case Competition this year. It was an opportunity for females across the country to participate together and showcase their talents. First year MBA students, Xianjin and Christine were selected amongst several others to participate in their inaugural competition.
Christine Pham, MBA ’22
“We were tasked to come up with a proposal on how to leverage AT&T’s 5G network to Millennials and Gen-Z’s as a new target demographic. It was a great opportunity for us to use what we learned from class, such as applying SWOT and industry analysis to real life business challenges. We used the accounting and finance concepts that we learned to analyze the historical data and forecast the financials,’’ described Christine.
“It is a new experience for me. I had a chance to network with female students from other business schools in a virtual environment. Our team received generous support and feedback on our proposals from our assigned mentor at AT&T, and through the questions that were asked during each round of the competition. We learned a lot from all the finance professionals who served as judges and made improvements to our proposed strategy accordingly,” says Xianjin. “Christine and I will definitely recommend more female students to participate in the competition next year!”
Xianjin Cai, MBA ’22
Overall, the competition was a great success and provided an important opportunity to showcase the strength of Foster’s program. AT&T presented a challenge that was relatable to what students learn in their first year and allowed them to apply these concepts. We hope other students take the chance to participate in upcoming years.
A note: The team consisted of four women, with Christine and Xianjin representing the UW Foster School of Business, Evangeline Chen from USC Marshall School of Business, and Shannon Gao from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Together they made up the West Coast team.
