Rejection Challenge

Last week in class we spent 1 hour and a half doing the Rejection Challenge (also known as Red Paper Clip Challenge). Each team starts off with a transparent acrylic box worth 50 cents. The idea is to trade the box for something of higher quality (price), and continue to trade items until the time is up. The team that brought back the item of highest value won.

We started by filling the tiny box with some flowers we found, in an attempt to add some value to it.
We successfully traded our flower box with a student for a couple of his meal plan credits. With those credits we bought some fruit snacks.

Shortly after we ran into the girl scouts selling cookies. They were sweet enough to trade one pack of the fruit snacks for one pack of thin mints. This was a great step up because we were now at 1000% profit with our $5 cookies.

I didn't know these cookies were so popular, but almost every student we asked wanted the cookies! Our issue was that no one really carried around something worth more than $5 that they were willing to give away in exchange for the cookies. So instead we decided to go into the campus buildings where there where offices that potentially could have more accumulation of unneeded but worthy things.

We walked into Berkeley's Art Studio and asked the receptionist if she was interested in trading the thin mints for anything they had. She was, as expected, very excited about the thin mints and ran off around the studio to see if she could find any scrap artwork. She first gave us an unglazed pot, that was cute but probably not worth the $5 cookies. We asked her if she had anything that was finished. She ran back out and came back to us with a cute small glazed pot she said was on sale for $20. Definitely a win! So we made the trade and continued on our search for something bigger and better.

We then headed into a building that we knew had a lot of professor offices. Our train of thought was that professors probably have some junk laying around in their office they'd want to give up. The first professor's office we walked into she was very kind and searched her entire office for something. All she could come up with was a Nigiri Pin Holder that costs about $9. Why did we make the trade? Well, we felt bad after the professor search her entire office, gave us some time in her busy schedule, and presented us with the Pin Holder excited for the trade. Also, we wanted to be "within the rules" which meant we had to complete 5 trades, and this would have been our 4th. So we traded the pot for the Maki Tacks and went to the next professors office.

This was a German professor and he didn't have much to offer but he did have a bunch of books including some he had actually written himself. He said that the Tacks would make a great gift for his daughter and that we could pick a couple books in exchange. We searched around his office and ended up choosing three books that together cost around $80! So in the end even though we had difficulties trading or even trading for things of lesser value, we ended up with 16000% profit that for our team was a great gain.