Attending Snow College together, serving in the same mission, and now sharing a fourth place victory as teammates in the National Capsim Challenge, BYUH freshmen David Wu and Taylor Lam said when it came to choosing a partner for the competition, the decision was easy.
“He happened to be the best student in his class, so why not recruit him?” said Wu, a finance major from Hong Kong.
Lam, an accounting major also from Hong Kong, said, “I loved working with David because he's really intelligent. Before the competition started, he did all these calculations and set up formulas that gave us a bigger picture.”
The challenge was sponsored by Capsim, a simulation technology used in business courses and corporations across the globe. The competition completely simulated running a business, and pitted students against each other as companies battling to come out on top, according to Capsim’s website. The BYUH team was initially up against 141 other teams. Six made it to the finals.
“It was like a mental marathon,” said Wu. “The whole competition went on for seven hours in a row; it was the longest competition I’ve ever been in.”
Each hour represented one year, and at the end of each year, Wu and Lam checked with nervous anticipation the status of their six competitors’ companies.
“It’s hard because you don’t really know what other people think,” said Wu. “You have to take risks in doing things you think are best for the company but that uncertainty is always there.”
Due to different time zones, the challenge began at 7:30 a.m. for the BYUH team, who spent all seven hours competing in their hale.
“It was disappointing starting off,” said Lam. “We suffered some unexpected losses and knew we probably weren’t going to make the big prizes, but we tried hard to focus more on something we could do better.”
Despite their rocky start, Lam and Wu relied on each other to work their way up. By the end, they knew they wouldn’t finish in last place and had hopes for fourth place, according to Wu.
“That’s another thing we had to work on as teammates,” said Lam. “He is pretty positive about everything, and I am pretty negative about everything, so we needed to find the balance.”
Both agreed two was the best number for the team. “In a team with more people, you have five or six ideas flying around and it can be hard to reach a consensus,” said Wu. “The best part of the simulation was when we were able to work together and get so much out of it.” When conflicts or disagreements did arrive, Wu said it was easy for them to “take a step back and look at the whole situation again, without holding onto opinions or being adamant about ideas.”
Although the teams they were up against were better than they had expected, and despite being a little disappointed by the outcome, both Wu and Lam said they learned much that will help them in the future.
“We now know what our weaknesses and strengths are,” said Lam. “We didn’t oversee enough about ourselves to take the courage to do what we should have for our company. And I think that’s what entrepreneurship is—someone who takes the courage to step somewhere they’ve never been. And maybe I can start a business in the future, using the skills I learned here.”
“The biggest lesson I learned in this competition,” said Wu, “is that you’re never too good to continue to learn and improve.”