Wisconsin MBA

On January 26^th, I had the opportunity to participate in a Wisconsin MBA tradition – the Graduate Marketing Network (GMN) Case Competition!  The purpose of the event is to give first-year students an opportunity to participate in an organized case competition.

Pete McCarty

One of the more challenging aspects of the competition is the short amount of time that teams have to prepare.  Working in groups of four students, each team is assigned the same case at 5pm for presentation the following day starting at 9:20 am.  Needless to say, just being perky in time for the presentation after a long night of preparation can be a challenge!

This year’s competition provided a great opportunity for me to step out of my comfort zone.  I was working on a team with colleagues whom I had not previously worked with, and it is never easy to collaborate under such intense time pressure.  Fortunately, the team was dedicated and talented, so by the time we needed to present we were confident that we would be prepared.

Getting in front of this year’s judges was a real treat.  Leaders from Land’s End, SC Johnson, General Electric, and Kraft were the judges for this year’s competition and in addition to presenting to them, we had lunch with them followed by an afternoon debrief where we reviewed the positives and the negatives from the morning sessions.  From my perspective, this was the most helpful part of the experience because you get a candid, professional evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses and concrete suggestions on how you can improve presentation quality.

Following each team’s debriefing session, all the participants and MBA students were invited to watch the top two teams from the morning session present again in the afternoon.  After the judges deliberated and announced the winner of this year’s competition, there was a networking session where students could interact with the judges.  Just like the debriefing session, this time was extremely valuable for case participants and other attending students as a way to network and speak candidly with the judges and learn about their organizations.

The Wisconsin MBA program and GMN organization have a great tradition going with the case competition.

Winning Team: Caitlin Fitzgerald, Doug Stuckey, Cally Thornton, Kristina Engeseth 

2^nd Place Team: Melissa Martinez, Valerie Kuts, Chris Lawton, Bo He