Pitt Business e-newsletter Issue 12, November 2008
Globalism Leads to Third Place Win
(Left to right: Jan Schlichenmaier, Imran Dalwai, Robert Grossic, Marcelo Hermosill Saurie, Jennifer Swartz, and Philipp Kaethe)
What is a jirga? That was just one of the tricky questions at the October 14 WorldQuest Trivia Competition sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh and held at the Omni William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. The trivia team competing from the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business had an excellent strategy for answering this type of question; in a word, globalism. The six Katz team members spanned the globe in experience. Team captain, Robert Grossic, an operations major from Pittsburgh, was able to use his U.S. Army experience in Afghanistan to answer, a jirga is a council of Pashtu elders.
The Katz team competed against 30 other teams made up of not only university students from all over southwestern Pennsylvania, but also professionals from global corporations like Bayer MaterialScience AG. There were four rounds of 10 questions with one round dedicated exclusively to Pittsburgh trivia. When the Katz team tied for third place they used their world knowledge to win the tie-breaker.
"The competition was fierce and they did us proud," said team organizer and Katz Director for Special International Programs Patricia Hermenault. "I am thrilled with their performance."
As part of their strategy, each of the Katz team members focused their two months of preparation on specific areas. Jennifer Swartz, a student in both the Katz School and the University's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs with concentrations in operations management and nongovernmental organizations and civil society, was born in Milton, Pa., but she has lived in Seville, Spain; Accra, Ghana; and Jinja, Uganda. She focused her trivia preparation sessions on Africa. After the third-place win, Swartz said, "We were competing against professionals, not just students and we left our mark on the competition."
Also on the team were Marcelo Hermosilla, an operations major from Viña del Mar, Chile, who focused on Latin America and world flags; Imran Dalwai, an information systems major from Mumbai, India, who focused his trivia study on Asia; and Philip Kaethe, a strategy major from Berlin, Germany, who took on the category of Europe and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Grossic focused on the category Global Pittsburgh.
Another good trivia question that caused much debate among the business students was: Which country has more companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange: England, China, Germany, or Israel? The Katz team correctly reasoned that the answer was Israel because the other countries have their own stock exchanges. Another tricky question was: Why was the Thai Prime Minister forced to resign? The team put their heads together and came up with the answer: Payments stemming from a cooking show. The global perspective of Katz can truly be seen in competitions such as this one.
