Academics

Smeal students vie for $50,000 scholarship in year-long real estate competition

Five Penn State students, four from the Smeal College of Business, have teamed up to try win a $50,000 scholarship for the University in The Real Confidence University Portfolio Challenge.

Mike Black, finance; Duc Do, accounting; Icy Trinh, risk management-real estate; Artur Sharifullin, risk management-real estate; and Lucas Malavarca, economics; are all members of the Student Chapter of the Real Estate Society, a broad-based initiative by the Smeal College of Business, Institute for Real Estate Studies. It seeks to engage the alumni and friends of Penn State participating in the real estate industry. The Real Estate Society promotes and supports activities among our industry participants and strengthens ties with the University and its students.

“As leaders of the organization, we saw it as essential that we take initiative and participate in this real estate competition,” Trinh, the president of the student chapter, said. “It’s a great opportunity for hands-on learning and team building, as well as raising awareness about Real Estate Society and representing Penn State on a national level.

Teams from Penn State and 14 other schools were chosen for the competition. The teams were allocated a theoretical $1 billion across public and private commercial real estate sectors -- private equity, public equity, private debt, and public debt -- to create the best performing portfolio. The winning school will be awarded a $50,000 scholarship when the competition wraps up on July 30, 2016.

The teams have locked in their picks and the competition went live on July 6. More information and a digital leaderboard are available at RealConfidence.com/UniversityPortfolioChallenge.

“As the challenge was sponsored by Altus Group, our investments were based off of the real-life investments the company makes. We get to choose how much to actually allocate to each sector,” Trinh said.

“Our strategy was to focus mainly on private equity, and we invested the majority of our funds into office and apartment projects in the Midwest. The rest of the budget went to public equity under the health care sector, and we also put a small portion of our investment into private debt.”

Each school’s portfolio can be viewed here: realconfidence.com/universityportfoliochallenge/teams/

Last Updated July 13, 2015

Contact