Four CPU students – Claudia Barna, Brian Hathaway, Anup Tapase and Seung Yoo – represented Northwestern at the second annual Big Ten Leadership Case Competition in Madison, Wis., in March, 2009.  Teams from the Big Ten schools analyzed a General Motors case covering a wide range of issues, including whether or not to file for bankruptcy, what to do with Rick Wagoner, whether or not to sell non-core brands like Hummer and Saturn, and how to approach negotiations with labor unions.  A panel of five business leaders judged the teams’ presentations.  While the CPU team did not win, the judges commended the team for incorporating all team members and for developing a presentation that flowed logically from one point to the next.

“Coming from the CPU program, we were used to looking at these competitions primarily through a quantitative lens,” said Hathaway.  “Since there was actually no math involved in the case, we had to go outside our comfort zone to come up with recommendations.  Since the case was extremely current, we had to challenge the assumptions and opinions we had about GM heading into the competition.  And since we had only two and a half hours to develop a presentation, we were forced to work quickly as a team. The case was really a fantastic experience.”

The students received help preparing for the competition from second year Kellogg MBA student David Stott and CPU Academic Director Jan Eberly.

CPU students Jennifer Long, Reed Walker and Ozgur Tekin became the first team from Northwestern to participate in the annual Rotman International Trading Competition (RITC).  Hosted by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, the competition brings teams of students and faculty from universities worldwide to participate in a unique three day conference. RITC utilizes simulated trading cases that closely mimic different aspects of real world markets.  This year’s competition included sales and trader, open outcry (pit trading) and natural gas futures trading cases. 

Long, Walker and Tekin spent a month preparing for the competition, gathering information and advice from numerous Kellogg professors and students.  “Our lack of experience came up as a disadvantage compared to other schools which have continuously sent teams to the competition in the past years,” said Tekin, who helped organize and led the team. “However, we learned a lot, and we are looking forward to getting better results next year.  Overall, we did better than average. For the bond trading case, we printed out huge tables of bid/ask values instead of making interactive excel sheets.  This let us react faster to market changes, and we were among top teams in that category.”

CPU Students Alex Rus (FE Certificate) and Jeff Cao (MA Certificate) were among 21 Northwestern University juniors inducted into the Northwestern University chapter of Phi Beta Kappa on June 16, 2009.  Both are Weinberg students. Alex also received the Frederick S. Deibler Award for Distinguished Honors Thesis from the Economics Department.

CPU Senior Bobby Krenn (FE Certificate), who was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior last year, received the Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences Michael F. Dacey Award for the Most Outstanding MMSS Senior Thesis this year.

Yee Hoong Chow (MA Certificate) was awarded The 2009 ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship by the Embassy of Switzerland in the US. Yee Hoong will be in Switzerland this summer at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne working with Professor Vassily Hatzimanikatis, a leading world expert in computational modeling.