The final Town Hall meeting of the semester will be held at noon on Thursday in the Commons. *Agenda includes:
Lunch provided. Please join us!
* Agenda subject to change
The National Society of Hispanic MBAs Business Case Competition is accepting applications for participants through April 26, 2013.
This unique event which gives high-potential MBA student teams from leading business schools the opportunity to compete for prizes and recognition at the annual NSHMBA Conference & Career Expo in San Antonio, TX on October 9-12.
Teams will be given a hypothetical business case for which they will develop business solutions for a current operational, marketing or financial challenge. Each student team will present their case before a panel of experienced business leaders from PepsiCo, sponsors of the event. Teams will be judged on their analysis of the case, the feasibility of their recommendations, and the quality of their presentations.
Interested? Enter at www.nshmba.org/PepsiCoCaseStudy. Remember, the deadline to apply is Friday, April 26!
Financial Calculator suggestions from Prof. Beckmann: He recommends the HP 12C by Hewlett Packard ($80). This is the calculator that he uses. Students can also use the HP 10B, but it is not applicable for professional work due to its limitations on cash flow inputs and memory. Texas Instruments and Casio also make fine financial calculators. The UST Bookstore in TMH has both the HP 12C and HP 10B in stock if you need to purchase one.
Career Services Job Shadow Day – Tuesday, January 29th. Full-time UST MBA students will be shadowing professionals in their areas of interest.
ACG Cup hosted by St. Thomas – The first round of the ACG Cup will be held on Thursday, January 31 at the University of St. Thomas’s Schulze Auditorium. 3 separate teams will represent St. Thomas at the competition. The Case has been distributed and the teams are working on their presentations. Winners from the 1st round move on to the final round scheduled for Thursday, February 7th. Good luck to our St. Thomas teams!
A team of three University of St. Thomas Full-time MBA students placed first in the graduate division at the national Intercollegiate Business Ethics Case Competition in September. Team members Annelise Larson, Dan Jackson and Kristian Olson presented “Micro-Finance and Ethical Advice to Interested Parties” for the win.
The competition was held Sept. 20-23 at the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association’s annual meeting in Bellevue, Wash. It was hosted by Loyola Marymount University, the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association and the University of St. Thomas.
Dr. Kenneth Goodpaster, Koch Endowed Chair in Business Ethics at St. Thomas, and Jim Arnold, professor in the Full-time UST MBA and UST MS Accountancy programs, were faculty sponsors of the UST team.
Larson, Jackson and Olson also were awarded “runner-up” recognition when the winners of the graduate, international, undergraduate north and undergraduate south divisions competed in a cross-divisional final four competition.
The team has been invited to deliver its winning presentation at another ECOA conference on “Building and Benefiting from an Ethical Organizational Culture,” Nov. 2-4, at the University of St. Thomas’ Minneapolis campus.
Also competing in the graduate division were teams from INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France), Seattle University (Seattle, Wash.), St. Louis University (St. Louis, Mo.), University of Oxford (Oxford, England) and the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, Calif.).
Members of the winning St. Thomas team were selected last spring through the Center for Ethical Business Culture’s Ethics Case Competition hosted by the CEBC, the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business and UnitedHealth Group.
The CEBC Ethics Case Competition is one of several ethics education initiatives on which the Opus College of Business and CEBC collaborate to engage tomorrow’s business leaders in the challenges of building enduring ethical and profitable business cultures.
Originally posted in the Bulletin.
By Jeff Kaczrowski Assistant Director, Graduate Business Alumni
The Third Annual Full-time MBA Student and Alumni golf outing recently took place at Theodore Wirth Golf Course. Fifty students and alumni competed for the top honors but there was no match for the ’07 grads.
With an impressive ten under par, the alumni foursome; Cameron Zuege MBA ’07, Nate Johnson MBA ’07, Ben Roselle MBA ’07, and Allison Burchill MBA ’07, repeated their title for a second year in a row.
This however, did not come without a bit of suspense. As foursomes finished their round, golfers congregated outside of the clubhouse to hear the scores of participants as they came off the course. The gallery outside of the clubhouse was building and it continued to fill with students and alumni as the last foursomes made their way off the course relaying their scores.
Suspense built as Dean Puto and his teammates came off of the 18th green. With a stoic gallery, the score keeper asked the Dean, “how was the round?” With a smug response, Dean Puto responded, “Did anyone beat 11 under?!?!” The gallery gasped, knowing that the current score to beat was 10 under.
The Dean continued, “We didn’t either, but it would be quite the round!” Suspense turned to laughter, and with that, the defending champs knew their crown would rein for yet another year.
Following the festivities at the course, golf participates were greeted at the Park Tavern by FT MBA students and alumni who did not golf to share the stories of the day, and to award prizes to the winning foursome. It was a great event filled with much laughter, new introductions, and many swings!
The 3rd Annual Center for Ethical Business Cultures (CEBC) case competition took place in Schulze Auditorium today. Three teams of Full-time UST MBA students tackled this year’s topic, “Microfinance: Ethical Advice to Interested Parties.” Six judges, playing the role of venture capitalists, evaluated the teams’ analyses. Thank you to our distinguished judges:
The winning team was comprised of second-year student Kelsey Luers and first-year students Sara Christenson, Nick Ertz, and Dan Jackson. Congratulations!
The judges selected a team of “all stars” who will represent UST at the national ethics case competition in September in Seattle. The all star team members are second-year student Kelsey Luers and first-year students Annelise Larson, Dan Jackson, and Kristian Olson. JD/MBA student Scott Buell was selected as the alternate for the all star team. Best of luck to the all star team as they prepare to defend our national championship this fall!
Thank you to the CEBC as well as United Health Group for sponsoring this outstanding annual event. Special thanks to Terri Hastings of the CEBC, who handled the logistics for the event, as well as Kay Wimer and Karla Duren, who worked closely with Terri throughout the planning process.
Photos and additional details about the CEBC competition will be available on Monday on Opus Magnum.
It is my great pleasure to inform you that our team of first-year MBA students won the ACG (Association for Corporate Growth) Cup final round last night. The team, consisting of Bhakti Raicha, Brett Wong, Ted Long, Kyle Jorgenson, and Gurkan Peksoz, combined outstanding financial analysis with excellent presentation skills to secure the victory. Congratulations to the team!
The team from the University of Iowa placed second, the UST Class of 2011 team (Kevin Hejna, Sam Sands, Shawn Moses, and Brad Maiers) took third, and the team from St. Cloud State University placed fourth.
I hope you’ll join me in congratulating our winning team. They will be honored at the ACG luncheon next Tuesday, February 15, and will split a $5,000 prize from ACG.
Thanks again to Kay Wimer, Kevin Hejna, and Professor Jeff Oxman, who did an outstanding job organizing this year’s ACG Cup. Thanks also to all of the students who attended last night and cheered on our UST teams!
Dustin Cornwell | Program Director, Full-time UST MBA Program
The Center for Ethical Business Cultures’ Ethics Case Competition will be held on Friday, March 4, beginning at 8:30am. The winning team from this competition will be going to the national contest in Washington State this fall. To be part of the team that hopefully adds another beautiful trophy to our wall of fame sign your group up with Bill Grau grau1524@stthomas.edu by Monday, February 7.
Interested in participating in the ACG Cup competition in February? Sign your team up no later than January 18. Info on the case will be available to the teams on January 20. The first round of the competition will be on February 3.
ACG recommends 3-4 people per team although up to five people are allowed. Please send me your team list with the following info:
If you do not have a team, but still wish to participate, send me your name, email and phone. We will try to match you with others interested in forming a team.
This is a great opportunity to network with people from the premier banking institutions in the twin cities. Please let me know if you have any questions.
A four-person team of second-year UST MBA students won first place in a national Net Impact competition designed to challenge teams to analyze and propose business solutions for Integrated Packaging Corporation. The UST MBA team – Bill Grau , Kelsey Luers, Sean Elder and Hans Strommen – was one of five teams presenting its analysis at the 2010 Net Impact Conference, October 29-30, at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
The case competition, “Pioneer Employer Case Competition: Raising Wages, Increasing Profits,” was sponsored by Net Impact and the Hitachi Foundation. It focused on the story of Al Fuller, the co-founder of Integrated Packaging Corporation (IPC), who dramatically improved the standard of living for his employees while also turning his company’s fortunes around. In addition to the case analysis, the competition required students to work with MBA faculty and administrations to incorporate cases on pioneering employers into their MBA programs.
The competition had 29 participants in the first round, of which five finalists were selected. The finalists, who presented their analyses to Mr. Fuller himself, included the University of St. Thomas, the University of Arizona, Drexel University (two teams) and the University of Michigan. The St Thomas team won $5000 with the first place honors.
As part of the curriculum change proposal portion of the competition, the UST MBA team secured support from Dean Christopher Puto as well as each member of the full-time faculty.
Bill Grau, one member of the team noted that “The level of support we received distinguished us from the other teams in the competition….This competition stretched our thinking in a number of ways. Having the opportunity to present directly to Mr. Fuller made the work we were doing feel more tangible than the typical case analysis we do for classes. The curriculum change portion of the competition has enabled us to have a distinct and lasting impact upon the program here at St. Thomas. The entire process was a very real and practical exercise in business analysis, change management and team leadership. “
Net Impact (http://www.netimpact.org/index.cfm) is an international nonprofit organization with a mission to inspire, educate and equip individuals to use the power of business to create a more socially and environmentally sustainable world. For more information about the Opus College of Business chapter of Net Impact, visit http://www.stthomas.edu/business/degrees/clubs/netimpactclub.html.
Article By: Bill Grau
