Last November at Fuqua, I found myself pitching flushable wipes to strangers, debating breakfast burritos for Chipotle at midnight, and learning more about teamwork than I ever expected. To make the most of our Fall 2 Term, and to put our Strategy and Marketing coursework into action, a couple of my friends and I signed up together to participate in the Fuqua Brand Challenge and the Fuqua Specialty Masters Case Competition.

The Fuqua Brand Challenge

When we were first assigned P&G’s Charmin Flushable Wipes and told to come up with three target consumer segments and a strategy to improve product trials, we were lost. We so badly wished for the products the other teams got — Hershey’s chocolate, Life Savers gummies, and Cheetos. Each team was assigned a brand and a specific marketing task, and ours required us to think creatively about how to make an unglamorous product engaging. The challenge entailed setting up a booth during Fuqua Friday and making it fun and interactive so that people would want to try the product. We wondered, who’d want to learn about a replacement for toilet paper over getting free candy or chips, right?

However, thanks to my amazing teammates, we ended up with an awesome booth. We had games like peanut butter pong and balloons, where people could drop ping pong balls (beer pong-style) into cups with peanut butter, and put peanut butter on balloons, and then compare the cleaning efficacy of toilet paper versus our flushable wipes. We came up with fun captions like “Our cheeks deserve pampering too,” decorated a photo booth, and forced a teammate to dress up in a bear onesie representing the Charmin mascot (she secretly loved it).

While it was great that people loved our booth enough to make us win the Popular Vote and Second Prize, the actual victory was getting two of our friends in MMS to permanently switch from toilet paper to flushable wipes — go Charmin!

The Fuqua Specialty Masters Case Competition

At the end of a long day of classes and assignments at Fuqua, my team felt like we didn’t have the energy to participate in the 24-hour case competition that we’d signed up for. While we made our way to Geneen Auditorium, all we were excited about was the free dinner. So you can imagine our joy when we saw that it was Chipotle!

Little did we know that it was probably “field research” of some sort — because for the next 24 hours, we were going to be working on a business strategy case focused on Chipotle’s declining store traffic and customer loyalty. After six hours of heated discussions and turning the whiteboard in Team Room 31 black, we decided to call it a day. The next morning, it was time to lock in right after class and create a slide deck for our solution: a Chipotle breakfast menu. It was a lot of fun pitching breakfast burritos in front of the judges and everyone who took part, and this time we won the Popular Vote and Third Prize.

While both competitions helped me learn more about marketing and strategy, and gave me hands-on, real-world experience in a short amount of time, two takeaways stood out as far more important to me.

1. The Team Fuqua Spirit

It was Fuqua Friday — the day of the booth presentation, and we had nothing ready! We knew what we wanted our booth to look like but had not started executing yet. After class, all six of us spent the whole day running around to get things in order — marketing pamphlets, game supplies, posters, and a slideshow.

The best part? Our friends who were not even a part of the team offered to help us out. They simply showed up to our messy and chaotic planning table in the Fox Center and asked, “How can we help?” They helped with everything from cutting chart paper and grabbing last-minute printouts to distributing pamphlets around the cafe to promote our booth. Without them, there’s no way we would’ve made it.

Honestly, I think I enjoyed being part of that “organized yet chaotic orchestra” for five hours, even more than the two hours of Fuqua Friday itself. We were truly a team looking out for one another, jumping in wherever needed, and having a whole lot of fun along the way.

2. Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

The case competition pushed us out of our comfort zones in a completely different way. None of us had done a case competition before, and suddenly we were faced with a messy business problem, limited data, and no “right” answer. There were a thousand ways we could solve the problem, and just as many reasons to doubt whether any of them were correct.

Coming from a more technical background, I’ve always been used to problems where 2 + 2 = 4. This wasn’t that. We’d form a hypothesis, dig into the data, realize it didn’t quite hold up, and then go back to the drawing board. More than once. And honestly, that uncertainty was uncomfortable. But that’s also exactly how the real world works.

Embracing the discomfort, rather than fighting it, helped us think more creatively, ask better questions, and come out of the experience more confident and informed. More importantly, it reinforced why I wanted to participate in these competitions in the first place: to explore skills and insights beyond the classroom, while genuinely enjoying the process alongside a supportive team. And having a group that had each other’s backs through the uncertainty made all the difference.