The Johns Hopkins Business and Consulting Club (JHBCC) hosted the 2014 JHBCC Mini-Case Competition on Friday. The competition lasted the entire day and was open to Hopkins undergraduate, graduate and medical students, post-doctoral fellows, medical residents and staff. The JHU Graduate Representative Organization and the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes (JHMI) Graduate Student Association sponsored the event.
The first winner was team modHealth, consisting of medical student Chris Bailey, graduate student Melissa Temkin and medical student Tim Xu. The second place prize went to team Mosaic, which was made up of junior Antonio Spina, sophomore Kush Gupta and freshman Anshul Subramanya.
Although the participants knew they were going to create presentations to develop recommendations for a specific business challenge, they only found out what the topic was on Friday morning. The challenge at this event focused on Tesla, an American company that manufactures and sells electric vehicles.
“This mini case competition is to give participants a sense of how to solve a real business challenge,” Co-President of JHBCC and graduate student Yuanming Suo wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “So the case is designed around a specific situation that Tesla currently faces — how to maximize its profitability given its massive spending.”
After the judges announced the topic for this year’s competition around 9:30 a.m., the teams had three hours to find data and create a presentation.
Many teams were made up of both undergraduate and graduate students.
After the first round of presentations, the judges selected five finalists.
According to Suo, the judges are Hopkins alumni who are currently working at consulting firms such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group and Accenture.
From 4:30-6 p.m., the five teams of finalists presented to the judges, the other participants and the attendees of the event, which was open to the public. After each presentation, the judges asked each team more about its plan.
Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) students Kia Guarino and Christina Whang felt that the finalists’ presentations were thoughtful and coherent, given that participants only had three hours to prepare recommended options.
The members of one finalist team, which called itself Bringing Home the Bacon, enjoyed how every team had different approaches to the problem.
“That’s one of the interesting things about consulting: You take a group of people and give them a problem and different people think in different ways,” junior Monica Rex, a member of the Bringing Home the Bacon team, said.
After the presentations, the judges shared their opinions on the presentations that they had seen.
According to Suo, JHBCC does not have permission to share judges’ names with non-participants.
“Some of the JHBCC organizers told us after that we [modHealth] had barely made the final round because all of the other teams were so polished, so I think we were relieved to have made it through and shocked to have won,” Xu wrote. “We were also the last team called up to present in the finals, which made it all the more suspenseful.”
After winning first place, modHealth’s members want to participate in other competitions.
The first-place winner won $150, and the second-place team earned $75.
During the last hour of the program, participants were free to speak and network with the judges. Overall, JHBCC and the judges were pleased with the outcomes of the mini-case competition.
“Compared to last year, our judges and board members have both acknowledged that the quality of finalists’ presentations have improved,” Suo wrote. “Part of it is because our club has organized a series of case study workshops before the competition.”
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