My Honest Review: A 4 Month Case Competition

This semester, I was lucky enough to enroll in a 1-credit case competition course; it ended up being such an amazing experience. Prep work for this competition began in January when students returned to campus, and wrapped up at the end of April. The goal of the competition was to select one of the United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), come up with a problem, and then pitch a solution. The competition hopes to build and inspire future sustainable business people, so teams also have to identify a current company that they're pitching the solution to.

At Loyola, four teams compete each year, with five people to a team. My team was focused on SDG 4, quality education. From that starting point, we honed in on literacy, and then got to work identifying a problem! What our team did was spend about 70% of our time honing in on our problem, and the remaining 30% crafting a solution. We were given two coaches, and starting meeting weekly to update them on our progress.

Once we decide to focus on literacy, we began meeting with educators and administrators in Baltimore's public school system, and came up with two key takeaways: the way to help is with time and money, and you need to intervene earlier in a kid's learning career to see the most success.

The five of us knew we couldn't help on the time front, but we could help with money. Our solution was to pitch to Amazon, and have the company partner with First Book, a national non-profit to create Amazon book bundles, to then be distributed to pre-K and Kindergarten students in Baltimore. Our research backed this idea; we discovered that kids who grow up with books in the house are 90% likely to graduate high school.

From the solution, we then spent a few weeks building our presentations: we needed a 25 minute pitch that included visuals, a 10 minute pitch, and a 90 second pitch. We worked hard to narrow down our presentations and make them understandable to an audience who didn't have any prior knowledge of what we were doing. 

After months of hard work, late nights, and genuine teamwork, our team competed virtually over the span of two days. And we got that hardware! We ended up coming in first place for both the 25 and 10 minute pitches, and couldn't be happier. While this was a lot of work (some weeks more work than actual courses), it was so so worth it in the end. I wouldn't trade this experience for anything :)