USA MBA Team Takes First in Case Competition

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Posted on April 23, 2019

Emmy Rieske

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A team from the University of South Alabama’s Mitchell College of Business took first place and $4,000 in a recent business case competition at the University of West Florida.

Mitchell College MBA students David Hinson, Jaikishan Maru and Rachel Smith beat out students from Illinois, Kansas, North Carolina and Florida.

The competition, open to all graduate students from AACSB-accredited schools, used a live case from a Fortune 300 company with over $50 billion in annual sales and traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Teams of up to five students presented their recommendations to the company’s executives.

“The cases we study in the classroom are usually from the past, but this was a live case and we got to make recommendations to the company’s executives in-person,” Smith said.

Judges praised the USA team’s recommendations as detailed, strategic and in line with the company’s overall direction.

The students had approximately six weeks to review the case and prepare recommendations. Presentations could be no more than 20 minutes long, and each team’s university was disguised with a code name in order to prevent bias during the judging process.

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