What’s It Really Like To Win A Date With A Celebrity Contest? 

7. During my MBA I got to go meet Warren Buffett and he was about the most down to earth dude you would ever meet. He bought us all a steak and root beer floats which he loves. There were several dozen of us from different schools, and the rule was each school had to bring at least half businesswomen.

8. I won one of these once, for a small meet and greet with a country singer, Carrie Underwood, if memory serves. It was pretty small. Essentially we waited around for hours for the announcement with maybe 75 other people at a pop up tent for a local radio station. The whole time they were pushing this contest where you could buy raffle tickets to meet her, blaring music and hosting their radio show. It was actually pretty chilled out and nice since it had the rule you had to be present to win, so there were a lot of people milling around and just hanging out. The problem was we waited around for several hours and my mother and I go so bored we were leaving when they started the drawing. We figured the odds were so small of us winning anyway that there wasn’t much point in wasting all day standing there instead of going to get something to eat. If we walked away three minutes sooner we would have missed out names being announced, and when they were we were in a mild state of shock and had to go to the table and double check that we heard right. Then we waited another half hour to an hour or so to be ushered back stage where Ms. Underwood was already doing other interviews/meet and greets. She was surrounded by people, from photographers and reporters, to I assume staff and security and other people from other contests for meet and greets too. We were guided to an open spot of floor next to her, got a hug, a brief hello, and an autograph and picture. She was super, ridiculously nice. Overall the actual “experience” was probably five minutes. I have to say I admired her ability to be amazingly polite and courteous under all the pressure of people demanding her attention. The fact that she seemed genuinely happy to see us was something that surprised me. I expected the normal polite but distant thing I’d encountered before with other celebrity autograph sessions and the like, but she was actually engaged with us and seemed to care. So, %99 percent of the whole thing was a bunch of waiting, but the actual thing we won was pretty cool and definitely memorable.