Chances are, you’ve heard about “Shark Tank”. Augusta University’s Hull College of Business does something similar. Here are 2 questions for the Dean to explain Hull’s version and how it promotes getting a taste of the real world.
ABD: What is the case competition for students?
HULL: So, our Case Competition is an event that we hold every year where students pair up and they form teams. And as a team, they get a case that they then work on with a faculty mentor, they write a memo outlining various prompts that they’re asked to address, and the five finalists then get paired up with an additional professional mentor out in the community to put together their final project and proposal.
They then present that in front of a panel of judges to award first, second, and third place, which come with cash prizes. First place is $3,000 to the team. So, split that in half, we also have, on the day of the awards recognition, the best poster prizes. And so, we get poster prizes from the craziest poster to the most professional poster to the most unique, so a variety of ways to recognize students that participate in the case competition.
ABD: Think back to one of the last few years. Does one of the cases stick out to you? And what unique insight did the students share based upon how they sort of studied the case.
HULL: So, all of the cases in the case competition have been loosely around the notion of internal controls, which is a topic that certainly is within business, but predominantly we find it in accounting.
So, students have, historically, have always felt like accounting students had a leg up in the competition. A couple of years ago, though, we had a team of two marketing students that entered the competition and ended up with the top prize. So that that’s that is nice to see when we talk about it as something that’s important in business, that you had two students in a field that you might not think about internal controls as your first thought as it relates to marketing, and so seeing two students understand the importance of internal controls to come away with the top prize was, was very satisfying.
Internal controls are how a business operates, what guiding principles or framework to do they have in how they manage their business from the financial side, the marketing side, managing people, and so forth. What rules or procedures are in place for the business to run and run effectively?
