In Texas, it sometimes seems like college life revolves around autumn Saturdays. These are the province of tailgating and football, sleeping in, or even the dreaded cramming before a Monday morning midterm. But for a crew of about 120 undergraduate business majors, MBA candidates, academicians and industry veterans, one October Saturday at the University of Houston was spent observing a different kind of competition: one in which the star players wore suits instead of shoulder pads and passed information instead of a pigskin.

“If you don’t spend your Saturdays learning something, it’s a total waste,” said Fawad Hussain, an MBA candidate at the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business. He was visiting UH to compete in the final round of the annual Oil and Gas Case Competition, in which teams must choose a company, value it, and present their findings to a panel of judges as though they were pitching to a group of investors. The competition attracted teams from colleges and universities across the country, although by the time of the conference, the pool had shrunk in previous rounds to just six teams.

The competition was accompanied by a day-long conference that included a keynote speech by former Shell CFO Lane Sloan, a panel that included Bob Jarvis, vice president of membership, business development and and capital markets of IPAA, and Oil and Gas Investor’s editor-in-chief, Leslie Haines, as well as networking opportunities. The event was hosted by the school’s Investment Banking Scholar’s Club and administered by Wall Street Training, the firm that conducts new-hire training for financial organizations.

“I think that really speaks to the character of our club, our school and anybody that really wants to be in the industry,” said Jack Reader, vice president of operations for the Investment Banking Scholars Club. “Investment banking is notorious for its grueling hours, and Saturdays are not a weekend day for investment bankers. That kind of culture is definitely something we try to reinforce.”

Jack Reader, vice president of operations for the UH Investment Banking Scholars' Club, said the organization was founded to help students get experience in investment banking and to set up pipelines into the industry. "There is a very strong culture of competition here," he said.

The need for skills

The competition provides students with something they can’t get in the classroom: hands-on training for the real world of investment banking.

“You’re actually put into a type of situation where clients can ask you any questions they want, you’re on the spot, and you have to answer them in the most proper and factual way,” said Adil Rajabali, an undergraduate finance major on the UH team, which came in second and was the only undergrad team to place. “I know this can be a huge value for me in the future.

“It’s also good because you get to meet so many bankers, learn the type of environment they come from, how they found themselves in the oil and gas world. And you create new networks, sure, but you also learn so much from the experience.”

Abhinav Jain, a former Schlumberger engineer who helped take the University of Texas team to third place in the competition, said it’s a chance to collaborate on a project, much like he would be expected to do in the real world.

“For an industry person, I got exposed to the financials, and for a financial person, it’s a great experience to pick on the industry knowledge,” he said.

The hope is that students who make it through all three rounds will see their skills develop in a short amount of time, Tyler Shine, a consultant with Wall Street Training and judge for the final round, told Oil and Gas Investor.

“We always liked the idea of developing content and helping students think about what it’s like to be in investment banking or in private equity and the types of skill sets that you need to master and become proficient in to help them get those jobs,” he said.

In oil and gas, especially, those skills are a hot commodity. According to a recent survey by industrial research firm Manpower Group, 58% of energy executives say their companies struggle to find needed talent, while 74% expect the problem to get worse in the next five years. Seventy-two percent say the ability to attract quality candidates to the energy industry will have a significant impact on North American competitiveness in the future.

The industry has responded with degree and certificate programs, as well as providing more training for current employees or recruits. It has also partnered with elementary, middle and high schools across the country to help develop science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curricula in hopes of diminishing the skills gap. According to Manpower, 56% of companies are investing more in skills development and training than they were five years ago. A whopping 93% of energy executives said that partnerships with academic institutions will be important to their ability to develop the workforce needed in the next decade.

The founding of the Investment Banking Scholars’ Club was also a way to address this skills gap, but in this case, it was addressed by the UH students, not the industry.

“All these banks are here in our backyard,” Reader said. “But they’re not looking at our school for many reasons. UH is becoming a well-recognized and highly ranked university, and through events like this we aim to increase the visibility of our club and school, and showcase the quality of our members and students.”

The club, which was founded in 2012, has a stringent acceptance policy: Students must have at least a 3.5 GPA or be a graduate student or Honors College member, and all have to apply. The acceptance rate is just below 15%, making it the most selective organization on campus at the University of Houston.

In addition to hosting the conference, the club also provides its members with training and co-publishes a financial journal with MBA students at Rice University’s Jones Business School. It aims to serve as a pipeline to investment banks, much in the way other schools do. So far, the club has landed alumni at SRR and Crutchfield Capital, and Reader himself interned at CapitalOne last summer.

“There is a very strong culture of competition that exists here, being the No. 1 most diverse public university in the nation,” Reader said. “That diversity creates positive competition for our students. There are a lot of hardworking guys here that don’t always have the same resources and connections into the industry which our competition from other schools usually have.”

The need to compete

The competition had no prize pool. The winners had to be satisfied with a trophy and bragging rights. But that was more than enough for the first-place Texas Christian University team.

“Bragging rights are everything,” competitor Kayvon Shahbaz, an MBA student at TCU, said. “Isn’t that your entire resume? When you look at some of the people who were speaking there, I know it’s cheesy, but that was the reward in and of itself. None of us had any oil and gas experience, and that’s a really great thing to be able to put on your resume. I think we all learned a ton, which was really the goal to start with.”

For other budding investment bankers, the event was about exposure. Finalists present to a group of executive bankers in a public round. This year, the judges included Rodrigo Cortes, associate in BBVA’s Project Finance Group; Bryan Lastrapes, managing director at Moelis & Co.’s Energy Investment Banking Group; and Marcus Stewart, principal and managing director at Marcus Stewart Capital.

Jain said that his team had chosen to present on Houston-based Sanchez Energy Corp. because of its position as a prolific acquirer in the Eagle Ford and because it’s a public company, so there would be no trouble in finding information. But he wasn’t expecting one of the judges to say that he had once worked on a deal with Sanchez. “This is not just a bullet on the resume, but something to talk about, and something to relate to others on,” he said.

The TCU team specifically searched for a Fort Worth-based company, and went with Marcellus player Range Resources.

“The thought was that we weren’t even expecting to get to the finals, so we decided to pick a company that’s in our backyard, because worst-case scenario, or most-likely scenario, is maybe we don’t make it to the finals, but this could very well be the company we might interview at someday,” Shahbaz said.

The team spent a combined 40 hours preparing its case. On the car ride down to Houston, instead of blasting road-trip mixes or talk radio, the team listened to Range’s latest quarterly earnings call to pick up any last-minute information it could find.

“You can do all of this research, but if you can’t articulate it in a short amount of time, then you’re doing yourself a disservice,” said TCU team member Gus Gildner.

MBA candidates Kayvon Shabhaz, left, and Gus Gildner were on the team that took first place in the Oil and Gas Case Competition. "You can do all of this research, but if you can't articulate it in a short amount of time, then you're doing yourself a disservice," Gildner said.

Reader said the exposure the competition provides goes back to the club’s strategic objective of setting up pipelines.

“When the club started, we didn’t have any technical instruction from the school in the form of classes or workshops to facilitate our participation in competitions, or provide a strong advantage to break into the industry,” Reader said. “We had to learn the skills ourselves.”

So, the club worked with the school to create the new Energy Analyst program as part of a strategic objective “to build and strengthen the platform from which we jump into industry.”

The program, Reader said, “leverages our school’s known competitive advantage in energy and provides instruction for the technical skills associated with banking, and strong fundamental understanding of individual sectors of energy, as well as how the energy industry moves as a whole.”

Hopefully, one more program to help narrow the skills gap.