Students place third at national business competition

Six undergraduates from the Hopkins chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA) placed third at the SABRE Business Simulation Competition at the AMA's 34th annual Collegiate Conference in New Orleans last month. The Hopkins team - founded in 2008 by the Center for Leadership Education's Entrepreneurship & Management minor program - made its first appearance in the competition and placed ahead consistent contenders.

The team, comprised of undergraduates Erica Suter, Xiao Le, David Carasiti, Matt Mulholland, Amanda Yaccarino and Katie Brooks and led by Leslie Kendrick, a Senior Lecturer in the Center of Education, draws heavily from the executive board of the Hopkins chapter of the AMA: Suter sits as its President, while Le and Carasiti share the title of Vice-President of Programming. This is the first year that the chapter has fielded a team for a marketing simulation contest, competitions whose attendance levels have corresponded with the increasing popularity of marketing as an academic discipline in the past three decades.

The team traveled to Louisiana over spring break to compete on Mar. 22.

"[It was] against all odds," junior Carasiti, a Mechanical Engineering major, said.

"We're all incredibly happy," he said. "Preparation was minimal and the software required [by the competition] usually poses a learning curve - but it looks like we broke it."

The SABRE contest is a hands-on, analytical test of students' ability to succeed in a dynamic marketplace. The initials SABRE stand for Strategic Allocation of Business Resources.

It injects its participants into a simulated "year" (seven hours) in a competitive business market, during which analyses are made, goods are purchased, employees are hired and, ultimately, a company report is compiled: a close quality evaluation of which determines the winner.

"Participants must make their decisions in the face of uncertain market conditions, including competitor's moves," the AMA website's page for the 2012 competition said. "As is often the case in real life, there is no one specific solution to a problem but there are alternatives that are clearly superior or inferior."

During the seven-hour contest, these solutions come in hyper-real-time, Carasiti said.

"We had a morning and afternoon to make decisions that a firm generally makes in a year," he said. "And we were definitely learning as we went along."

He cites the Hopkins' apparent "underdog" status as initially daunting, and the competition they faced as even more so.

"We were up against teams like [the University of Pennsylvania], which offers a full course to train students in the competition's marketing software. It was stressful at first, but when we jumped ahead of Penn in the second half, we thought 'wow, we've never done this before, and now we're beating one of the country's best marketing teams.' That's when we really became emotionally invested in it," he said.

Xiao Le, a junior Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering major, concurred.

"Penn competes every year, and this was our first. And we beat them," he wrote in an email to The News-Letter.

Leslie Kendrick, who advises the Hopkins chapter of the AMA, suggests that Hopkins' triumph derives from the raw ability of its team, with preparation - however minimal - as an ancillary benefit.

"The performance of our students who are minoring in Entrepreneurship & Management shows that they can compete with the likes of marketing majors at [Hopkins' peer institutions]," Kendrick wrote in an email to The News-Letter.

Hopkins offers no marketing major, but Kendrick, with two decades of experience in the Baltimore chapter of the AMA, utilizes the Entrepreneurship & Management minor and the Center for Leadership Education to identify students with marketing skills and link them with the local marketing network - an invaluable aspect of the AMA, Carasiti said.

"I became active [in AMA] this fall, when Professor Kendrick pushed me into it because I'm an engineer, since SABRE is just a lot of numbers. I've since had the opportunity to shadow the Chief Managing Officer of the Baseball Factory," he said, referring to the athletic education facility twenty miles south of Baltimore.

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