January 03, 2022:  Daisy Ru, a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q), a Qatar Foundation partner university, has won the Refinitiv Portfolio Management Competition, Middle East and Africa edition. The competition included competitors from 17 universities in seven countries.

The competition challenged students to build a portfolio of S&P 500 companies and manage it over several weeks. The top ten students were selected to present their strategy to a panel of judges. Ru scored at the top of the field, edging out the second-place competitor by only a fraction of a point.

Michael Trick, dean of CMU-Q, congratulated Ru on her exceptional performance: “The business administration program at Carnegie Mellon focuses on decision-making based in quantitative analysis. Daisy has embraced this approach, and I am so pleased to see how well she did against talented, experienced competitors from the region.”

Ru is a third-year business administration student who has a concentration in business analytics. Nearly all of her fellow competitors are in graduate school, or their final year of undergraduate studies.

Ru credits the CMU-Q faculty members for their encouragement and mentorship: “Our faculty are so amazing and supportive. Professor O’Brien and Professor Serkan in particular helped me to improve my presentation and share my strategy in the most efficient way.”

Serkan Akguc is an assistant teaching professor of finance at CMU-Q, and John O’Brien, who retired in December 2021, was a Carnegie Mellon associate professor of accounting and experimental economics.

“I like competitions like this because you take what you learn theoretically and apply it to reality,” said Ru.

In addition to a central core of courses in the functional areas of business, CMU-Q students in business administration can choose from several concentration areas. These areas include accounting, business analytics, entrepreneurship, finance, global economics, marketing management, operations management and strategic management.