Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell (center) meets with Radford’s team and its faculty sponsor, Assistant Professor of Economics Jennifer Elias (left). Team members include Zachary Kwiatkowski, Bryan Pomerantz, Jacob Fadool, Forest Kay and Jeffrey Moore.
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.
On Feb. 9, Radford’s Fed Challenge Team attended an open house for the competition at the William McChesney Martin Jr. Building.
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, Va., 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.
Neil Harvey for Radford University
