Four students from the International Business School won second place and a $1,500 cash prize Oct. 15 in a competition challenging participants with issues of gender and equality in the workplace. The team, which included Claire Schoen, Jon Louis, Amit Pinjani and Ergys Prenika, traveled to New York City on Oct. 14 for the Ninth Annual Reaching Out LGBT MBA Case Study Competition and competed against teams from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Columbia University, NYU's Stern Business School, Cornell Business School and Northwestern University. The team from Duke won first place.

The IBS graduate students had to analyze a case and recommend a strategy in response to it. The IBS team's case involved a real-life situation in which the chief financial officer at the investment firm Prudential Financial wanted to undergo a sex change in 2001, team member Claire Schoen said.

The students learned about the contest through the IBS Business Consulting Club, club president Ashwin Poorswani said.

After winning the first round, the Brandeis team competed for first place against Duke. Louis said he then realized how well his team performed in the competition.

"I think it started to sink in, and we were like, 'Oh, wow, we really did a good job here,"' he said.

For the case, the team decided to keep the Prudential officer in his position, Pinjani said. The team then spent its remaining time researching, building a presentation and soliciting feedback from IBS faculty, Louis said.

Prof. Andrew Molinski (IBS), who watched a run-through of the presentation, said the team did a fantastic job. Elana Givens, the assistant dean for career services at IBS, also looked on and offered suggestions for improvement.

"I told them to interview people in industry . and find out how people dealing with these issues would respond," Givens said.

Louis said the team was not too familiar with the case.

"Some of the folks we talked to at the conference were amazed that none of us had any experience in the [LGBT] community, and we were able to come in and give an analysis," he said, adding that the accomplishment "spoke to our diversity as a school being applicable to analyzing different situations."

IBS, which participated in the event for the first time, sent two teams to New York. The second team included Yevgen Bezvushko, Madhu Chandarasekaran and Tamara Cora.

Although many of the IBS participants were busy studying for midterms while making their preparations, Louis said they still gave their best performance on the day of the competition.

"We practiced for hours the night before, and it really showed," he said.