Student Accomplishments

Posted May 2009

Posted April 2009

Smith School's American Marketing Association Chapter Receives National Recognition

For the fifth year in a row, the American Marketing Association (AMA) chapter at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business returned from the International Collegiate AMA Conference with awards. Monisha Tripathi, terpAMA president, accepted the awards at the closing banquet in front of 1,300 students and faculty advisors from throughout the United States and neighboring countries. This year’s conference was held in New Orleans in March 2009.

terpAMA was recognized for outstanding marketing communications, community service and professional development. The chapter’s Web site, www.terpama.com, received honorable mention. Chapter officers responsible for these areas were Suzanne Howard, Kristine Trinchere, Lauren Moscone, Vishney Ambalavanar, Vidya Sathyamoorthy, and Aarushi Poddar, and Monisha Tripathi. Faculty advisors for the chapter are Rosellina Ferraro, assistant professor of marketing, and Mary Harms, marketing lecturer.

At the conference, Tripathi presented at the Collegiate Fundraising Session on "How to Write a Funding Proposal" and Harms presented a paper on the Smith School's "Design and Innovation Undergraduate Fellows Program" at the faculty session. Students attending the conference from Maryland included Chris Coraggio, Kelsey Cohen, Alex McCord, Caitlin Talty, Steven Feiner, Adam Saunders, Lauren Tallody, and Tripathi.

TerpAMA meets on a weekly basis throughout the academic year bringing in marketing professionals from a variety of fields to address members. As a part of providing its members real-world experience and also serving the community, the terpAMA assisted the town of Chevy Chase, MD, with research for their new carbon dioxide reduction project, as part of the Chevy Chase Challenge. The students come up with a strategic plan based on extensive marketing surveys to encourage homeowners to undertake energy audits and contribute towards making their city more environmentally friendly. "Students not only benefitted from the hands-on experience of conducting a focus group but they both came away from the project with more awareness and knowledge of the green movement and the challenges marketers will face in encouraging others to be involved," remarked Harms.

Posted March 2009

Smith Students Win Wake Forest Undergraduate Case Challenge

The winning team members were Molly Crossman (Junior - Marketing and International Business), Chris Coraggio (Sophomore - Operations and Marketing), Tom Pacak (Sophomore - Finance and Economics) and Vidya Sathyamoorthy (Sophomore - Finance and Marketing). For coming in first, the team won a trophy and a check for $1000.

Although the Wake Forest Marketing Summit is an MBA competition, it added an undergraduate segment five years ago. The top undergraduate marketing students in the country are invited to compete in the Undergraduate Case Challenge. It is described on Wake Forest's Web site as an "intense 36-hour competition to solve a strategic marketing challenge faced by this year's sponsor, PepsiCo." The case students were tasked with a challenge that revolved around a hypothetical company modeled after PepsiCo, and its effort to maintain its leadership in environmentally sustainable packaging across its beverage portfolio.

Competing teams participated in a two-phase challenge over the course of two months. The first phase began last semester, as students were given a week to come up with a five-page paper outlining their recommended solutions. From there, the top six highest-scoring teams from the online preliminary round were invited to attend the Marketing Summit over the weekend of February 5-7, 2009, and participate in the Case Challenge finals. Other schools competing included the University of Pennsylvania, Boston College, Brandeis University, Brigham Young University, and Wake Forest University.

In addition to the competition, all teams also had the opportunity to attend an interview of Pepsi Chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi, conducted by Maria Bartiromo, host of CNBC's "The Closing Bell."

Teams received the case on Thursday night, and then were given 36 hours to complete it - a time period that ended Saturday at 7 a.m. The Maryland team found the 36 hour time period grueling but exciting. They began working immediately, and according to team members, they only slept for about two to three hours on Thursday night. Their hard work resulted in a twenty-minute presentation to a panel of judges from PepsiCo, as well as MBA students. They then had to wait for the Awards Gala on Saturday evening, at which point they were announced as the winning team.

The team cannot disclose what its solution was because they had to sign a confidentiality agreement. This indicates that PepsiCo may very well consider putting their recommendations to use in some form, which may be the team's biggest accomplishment of all.

"To say the competition was intense is an understatement. It was clear that the other teams were very experienced and many were juniors and seniors. At the same time, it was refreshing to see that the entire time everyone was comfortable and friendly with each other, and we left the competition with five teams of new friends," remarked Sathyamoorthy.

Pete Baird, 2nd Year MBA Candidate, Smith Media Group