Graduate business student Jong-Uck “Max” Park learned a lesson about luck today.
He picked out a briefcase containing $18,750, the equivalent of a semester’s tuition at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. That made him Darden’s Luckiest Student, the winner of a contest patterned after the television show “Deal or No Deal.”
Instead of Howie Mandel, the emcee for the Darden event was business professor Sam Bodily, who designed the exercise with fellow professor Phil Pfiefer.
This year’s Luckiest Student program started on Feb. 15 with five first year students going through a series of elimination events.  The field of competitors, for example, was winnowed by picking loaves of bread. One loaf had a $1 bill and the rest had $2 bills (bearing the face of U.Va. founder Thomas Jefferson). Park’s final challenge was choosing between two brief cases. One contained a sign saying “$18,750” and the other was empty. .
The entire exercise is part of a research experiment by Darden faculty but also teaches students the role that randomness plays in business.

Video: Darden’s Luckiest Student