Wharton Leaders

Students Prove Their Mettle at Inter-School Competitions

This spring Wharton student teams racked up enough inter- school competition championships to fill a trophy case. Following is a round-up of some of the winners.

Wharton Team Brings Home Executive Leadership Council victory

A Wharton MBA team led by captain William Lewis, WG’07, placed first at the Executive Leadership Council (ELC) Annual Case Competition sponsored by Shell and United Airlines in Houston, TX, on May 27. The ELC is the premier organization of Fortune 500 African American executives. The prize included membership in the NextGen Network for the five team members (Lewis, Khary Robinson, Temitayo Ogunnaike, Ellen Hunter, and Jay Womack, all WG’07), a trip to New York and Washington, DC, to be honored on stage at the annual ELC meeting, $20,000 in prize money, and a crystal trophy for the MBA Program Office. Wharton most recently won the award in 2003.

Undergrad Marketers Win First Place in AMA/New Orleans Case Competition

A team of 13 Wharton undergraduates took first in the American Marketing Association (AMA) case contest for the second year in a row. This year’s task was proposing remedies for the ailing Post-Katrina tourism industry in New Orleans, with eight finalist teams presenting their case before the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) at the AMA Collegiate Conference in New Orleans the weekend of March 28. Team members (Brandon Dunn, W’09, Amanda Ganske, W’08, Deborah Garber, W’09, Steve Gibson, W’07, Jean Hsu, Michelle Jacobs, W’09, Talal Kahn, Nancy Lee, W’07, Adela Mou, W’09, Charles Pensig, W’07, Jacob Suher, W’09, Joanne Tong, W’08, and Diana Zhou) impressed the judges with their integrated rebranding plan.

MBA Team Wins McKinsey Business Technology Challenge

Four Wharton MBA students beat 115 other teams to win the McKinsey Business Technology Challenge National Champions 2007 award. The team, Inflection Point, consisted of WG’08 students Tammy Hensel, Charles Njendu, Chijioke Onyewuchi, and Komal Rathi. Inflection Point won the National Challenge held in McKinsey’s New York office April 20.

The theme of the Challenge was to pick a company from the Fortune 100 and show how any mix of four technologies can dramatically improve revenue and/or productivity over the next five years. The four technologies were crowd sourcing and co-creation, ubiquitous broadband and persistent connectivity, virtual worlds for commercial use, and smart network elements and sensors.

Undergraduate Marketing Team Wins Wake Forest Case Competition

A team from the Wharton undergraduate marketing club, MUSE, won first place in the Wake Forest Case Competition. The winning team included Melissa Lamb, W’09, Lara Aleman, W’09, Sean Oliver, W’08, and Nhu Vu, W’08. The three-phase competition began October 30, 2006,with the winners announced at the Wake Forest MBA Marketing Summit February 10.

Wharton Wins Financial Engineering Competition

For the first time in seven years, Wharton emerged victorious at the 10th Annual Graduate Business School Financial Engineering Competition. The Competition was held on April 13 at the Lehman Brothers Inc. headquarters in New York. Organized jointly by the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and the Lehman Brothers Quantitative Research Group, the competition attracted teams from seven of the country’s top graduate schools. Each team took the perspective of an investment bank and was presented with a business problem that their client was trying to solve. The Wharton team members included Sandra Fontaine Moya, WG’07, Kedrick Brown, WG’08, Mohit Mittal, WG’07, Paul Morris, WG’07, and Sid Khanna, WG’07, with coaching provided by Domenico Cuoco, associate professor of finance.

Undergraduate Presents Paper on Entrepreneurship at International Conference

Henry Friedman, W’07, was selected to present a paper at the 27th Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference that he co-authored with Professor Gavin Cassar, as part of the Wharton Research Scholars Program. The paper is titled, “Does Overconfidence Affect Entrepreneurial Investment?” This year’s conference was cosponsored by Babson College and Instituto de Empresa Business School, and held in Madrid, Spain, June 7-9.

Wharton Undergraduate Presents Health Care Project at World Business Dialogue in Germany

Wharton undergraduate Geoffrey See, W’10, who already has been published in the Harvard Business Manager for his work on a health care project, EduHealth, was one of three student presenters at the 11th World Business Dialogue held March 28-29, 2007, at Universität zu Köln. His contribution was named the best essay for the topic “Changing Society — Civilizing the City.”

Wharton West MBA Team Competes in L’Oreal eStrat Challenge Finals

A team of Wharton West MBA students was the North American regional finalist for the L’Oreal eStrat Challenge, the world’s biggest online corporate strategy business game. Out of thousands of entries, eight finalists were chosen, with one team representing each world region. The Wharton MBA Program for Executives group (including Loren Simon, WG’08, Xiaoying (Alice) Zhang, WG’08, and Bolaji Olutade, WG’08) bested all other U.S. and Canadian MBA teams to present at the international finals in Paris, coming in fourth.

Undergraduate Named Winner of Goldman Sachs Competition

Undergraduate Ravi Naresh, W’09, was selected as one of the winners of the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program competition. The competition identifies and rewards the academic excellence and leadership potential of the most accomplished second-year students from all disciplines for the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program.