This Friday, AU’s Hull College of Business is challenging future business leaders with a first-of-its-kind competition.
The Dean of the School explains how it works.
“So, this year, we are piloting a high school competition slash conference event, and we are piloting it with Columbia County high schools.
We wanted to start small, and they’ve been talking with us about how we can create these competitive-type events around business cases. One of the things that we wanted to do is, with it being limited to just the Columbia County High Schools, really expand it to have a conference feel.
And so there may be some students that don’t want to compete in an actual case competition, but they’ll have the opportunity to sit in on a workshop around a variety of different topics.
We’re looking to have around 100 to 150 students. They’re going to come on October 17 for our event. We’re going to really try to make it a very productive event for the students, but also for the educators. There’s going to be a track for them to take part in learning more about business, learning more about Hull College, and Augusta University.
The conference will have certain tracks for students, and they’ll go through each of the tracks. The tracks will consist of learning about Hull College. There will be a mock case analysis. So, they will get a case that one of our faculty members has created, and they’ll get the walk-through on how to break that case down. There’s also a track on just business decision-making and business thinking. And so that each of these tracks is meant to be a 20-minute, condensed kind of lecture and activity, and then there’s a 10 Minute transition time to move on to the next one.
The competition will consist of three events, one in the area of, I think, marketing, entrepreneurship, and management. There may also be a finance one.
And with this being a pilot program, we are looking for businesses that are interested in sponsoring their time or financial resources. So obviously, hosting a number of high school students on campus along with chaperones, there’s going to be a cost in terms of just meals, snacks, and water. This will be a great opportunity to be in front of students. We also could very much use business professionals providing their expertise and serving as judges or volunteer for the events.”
