The Tower at The University of Texas at Austin will be lighted orange Thursday, Oct. 7 to recognize the Texas MBA Energy Finance Group‘s victory at the 6th annual National Energy Finance Challenge (NEFC), hosted by the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas in Austin.
The winning team members are Vivek Ponnada, Nick Matovich, Ian Rainbolt, Homer Bhullar and Jordan Hobfoll, all in the McCombs class of 2011.
The NEFC is a Master of Business Administration (MBA) competition that features finance issues specific to the energy industry. This year’s case, written by Chevron, centered on an international shale gas development and commercialization project.
MBA candidates from 15 of the top programs in the country participated. The Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and NYU’s Stern School of Business tied for second place with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania taking fourth. Other participating schools were Harvard, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell, Virginia-Darden, Michigan, North Carolina, Purdue, Chicago, California-Berkeley, Columbia and Duke.
The event was held on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 at the ATandT Executive Education and Conference Center on the university campus. Sponsors for the challenge included Chevron Corporation, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch Commodities, El Paso Corporation and the McCombs School’s Energy Management and Innovation Center.