A team of Farmer School students took the top spot among a field of more than 40 teams at the Crowe National Consulting Case Competition last week. Crowe said that the competition is designed “to give students a realistic picture of the challenging career or internship that a young professional would experience in our firm.”

Teams of four students were given 24 hours to resolve a case taken directly from a Crowe client example. Each team recorded their response for a Crowe judge to view, then a smaller number of teams were selected to virtually present live in a second round The six top teams then presented again live for the final round.

“Congratulations to Natalie Dorman, Meg Goldberg, Noah Ragan and Ben Skapura for coming in first place at the Crowe National Consulting Case Competition. Your content was spot on and the delivery was outstanding,” Crowe partner Tom Reznicek said in a LinkedIn post.

“That first day, we were on a Zoom call every single hour. And if we weren't, then we were doing research. So it was really cool having that intense pressure when it comes to a project, which you usually don't have for these competitions,” Ragan, a sophomore information systems and analytics major, said.

“We put a ton of work into it and once the competition hit, it was grind time. It was a little bit stressful, but I think we had a really good time doing it. I know I had fun and I learned a ton,” Dorman, a junior accountancy and finance major, explained.

It was the first national virtual consulting case competition for Crowe, but the company hopes to continue hosting them in the future, a spokesperson said. As the top team, the students share a $2,000 prize.