A team of students from the University of Southern Indiana Romain College of Business embraced the opportunity to compete at The Econ Games 2025 on April 3-4 at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio. This is the fifth time a USI team has competed in the event.
This year's team was the largest group USI has taken to the event with 10 students—Sydney Boyd, Ally Buchanan, Sam Burks, Tiffany Hall, Ivy Ke, Gwennith Kim, Cole Maynor, Dylon Moore, Nii Nikoi and Claire Patterson—and was led by faculty advisor Dr. Daria Sevastianova, Associate Professor of Economics. This was the largest Econ Games since its inauguration in 2018 with over 140 students participating from 20 different universities across the country including Elon University, University of Dayton, University of Kentucky and more.
While Sevastianova admits she was a little nervous about how a team of this size would all work together, she knew that she had to expand after one of last year’s participants mentioned that the experience gained from the event was so valuable that “everyone should do it”. The decision to include more students proved to be beneficial for everyone involved.
“I realized that it would be challenging to make everyone work together well. That’s why we invested so much time in weekly meetings to train and build the team. As a faculty advisor, I am very proud of how hard everyone worked to contribute to the success of our team,” said Dr. Sevastianova. “Our students represented USI so well.”
Claire Patterson, who was a member of last year’s four-person team, added: “As a large team, we had to divide and conquer.”
The students had the opportunity to work with 3CDC, the sponsor of this year’s event. 3CDC is a non-profit real estate developer focused on the Central Business District and Over-The-Rhine, two neighborhoods in Cincinnati. This year’s research prompt was to develop a communication strategy to showcase the value of civic spaces and parking assets to current or prospective commercial tenants.
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ach team had 24 hours to analyze anonymized data on areas such as concession sales, civic spaces and parking transactions. The students used their skills in economics to include concepts such as elasticity and the aggregate supply and demand model into their analysis for the final presentation. Their presentation concluded with a marketing strategy.
“We had to demonstrate the skills that employers are looking for,” said Ally Buchanan, who was also a member of last year’s team.
Dylon Moore added: “It was a high-pressure situation with the time constraint and other restrictions.”
The team also had the chance to meet via Zoom with USI alum Parker Collignon ‘22, who was a member of the USI team that won The Econ Games in 2022. He was able to provide them with some valuable tips to help prepare them for this experience. Patterson, who was also a veteran of this competition, shared her expertise with the newcomers as well.
Sevastianova also praised the team’s camaraderie and willingness to help wherever they could, mentioning Dylon Moore volunteering to drive one of the vans to shuttle 10 students to Cincinnati and Gwennith Kim baking muffins for the team’s weekly data cleaning and visualization exercises.
From creating friendships to preparing students for their prospective careers after college, The Econ Games proved to be a fruitful venture.
“This is a real-world application of academic experience,” said Cole Maynor.
View a gallery of photos from the trip here.