The Events Director of the International Finance Student Association, Ayushman Rathore, agreed to a telephonic interview in the days preceding APOGEE and spared no detail of its operations.

IFSA started in Rotterdam, Ayushman said, and has since spread its financial wisdom to four continents. It opens its doors only to the sophomore year and beyond, and these doors open up to the twin paths of an analyst and a consultant that only the worthy applicant can walk. IFSA undertakes live projects with clients of the real, competitive world, and that is one rationale Ayushman states to explain the tradition of not inducting freshmen. He further described the recruitments to be ‘especially intensive’, with tests and interviews of much financial rigor that disallow any potential distraction that other club applications threaten.

Next, Ayushman talked at length about a case competition IFSA had planned for APOGEE. Maintaining tradition, the association invited the nine other IFSAs of India to send four-person teams each to contest for a prize pool that Ayushman estimated would amount to Rs. 40,000. The case decks have been released to the international and Indian IFSA boards, Ayushman said, to ensure no relative delays in release between teams and thereby eliminate the last odds of unfairness.

The contest divides equal weightage between two rounds, and the last of the two constitutes a presentation on campus. The deadline for the first round, the events director revealed, is 25 March, and by then, all teams are required to submit their solutions to the aforementioned decks. The team will present their solutions between 29 and 30 March for all readers to spectate. The prize pool would be distributed among three winners chosen by a panel of experts.

As events director, Ayushman’s primary work concerns itself with APOGEE and IFSA’s Youth Empowerment Program (YEP) that dispenses financial knowledge among schoolchildren to usher in a new age of financial literacy in Pilani. The uncertainties herald this year’s technical fest, of budgets and of schedules; and by these uncertainties, not even IFSA has been spared. In fact, Ayushman would name these delays as the only challenge his association has been forced to war with so far. But he praised the CoStAA for their cooperation, stating that he could always count on them to answer when he called.