Students Excel At Spring Competitions
Students Excel At Spring Competitions
UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (March 30, 2005)—Students at all levels from Penn State's Smeal College of Business have successfully participated in a variety of competitions during the spring semester.
Some of the highlights include:
Annual Big Ten MBA Case Competition: Smeal's team of Erin Bauer, Steve Bisbee, Arun Gopalakrishnan, and Ben O'Neil finished first, ahead of Ohio State in second place and Wisconsin in third. Individually, O'Neil was named best speaker in the first and second rounds, and Bauer won the question-and-answer category in the first round. The competition called on MBA teams from each of the 11 Big Ten institutions to propose venture capital funding strategies to support the expansion of BabyCare Ltd. into China. Teams were given 24 hours for analysis and preparation, with judges acting as venture capitalists and teams functioning as company executives.
Rotman International Trading Competition: The Smeal team of Dejian Fang, William Hoffman, Alexander Keller, and Eugene Weissberger finished third overall and best among U.S. and undergraduate teams at the competition hosted by the University of Toronto in February. Twenty four teams from 23 universities participated in the event, which featured five rounds of financial trading simulations.
Marshall International Case Competition: Smeal undergraduates and Shreyer Honors students Michelle D'Cruz, Dan Lilly, Ann Pauloski, and Adam Sheetz finished third out of 24 teams at the February event hosted by the University of Southern California. Teams had 24 hours to research and develop a plan to handle the merger of Amgen and another large biotechnology company.
Penn State Graduate Exhibition: Ching-Hua Chen-Ritzo, a doctoral student in Smeal's Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems, took first place in the engineering category at the March event, which annually challenges graduate students to present their work in clear, comprehensible terms to people outside their fields. Chen-Ritzo's presentation was entitled "Optimizing Configure-To-Order Supply Chains via Large-Scale Stochastic Programming." The research uses mathematical models to determine optimal resource levels and product sales targets.
International Logistics Case Competition: MBA students Matt Deep, Fabian Dohmes, Bert Garnes, Alexis Saponsky, Matt Sheehan, and Mani Gokarnesan finished first at the February competition, which called on teams to analyze the case of a Turkish manufacturing firm relying on a third-party logistics company to handle its distribution throughout Turkey and Europe.
REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu.
Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, marketing, insurance and real estate, management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the Center for Digital Transformation, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.
