12 February 2024
Upon being briefed on the Future Retail Challenge competition in Paris, I heavily debated on my participation. On one end, during my undergraduate days, I have always signed up for case competitions as I hoped to leverage those experiences to build on my resume. On the other hand, the conflict of schedules and overlapping work loads do cause a degree of concern over viability. An additional question I have is the success rate of participating; do I have what it takes to make it to Paris? Will I be in a strong enough team that will get us there? There is already no prizes to be won, so it’s been difficult to justify putting in free work, especially if even going to Paris wasn’t guaranteed.
In the end, I signed up anyway, after hearing that I could possibly join students from another program, since I was unable to gather momentum from our MBA classmates to form a team in house. I figured, since I’ve always done it in university, I could do it again. I don’t mind the potentially wasted efforts, even if I wasn’t looking for job opportunities to arise from this conference, simply trying for a chance to go witness this conference would be worth the while.