Students Claim First Place in Business Analytics Competition

Thursday, June 21, 2018

 Kieng IV (faculty advisor), Cindy Hum (AFM, 4A), Jennifer Lo (CFM, 4B), Jasper Lam (AFM, 4A), Manhattan College, Business Analytics Competition & Conference judge.

L-R: Kieng IV (faculty advisor), Cindy Hum (4A, AFM), Jennifer Lo (4B, CFM), Jasper Lam (4A, AFM), Manhattan College, Business Analytics Competition & Conference judge.

Each year, the O’Malley School of Business at, Manhattan College hosts the Business Analytics Competition & Conference (BAC@MC). This past May, a team of School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) students and their faculty advisor competed in New York City to capture first prize.

Three students from the SAF, Cindy Hum (AFM), Jennifer Lo (CFM), and Jasper Lam (AFM) acknowledged the level of difficulty in this competition and challenged their ability to think outside the box.

“Most questions posed by the evaluation panel were to encourage us to think larger, bigger picture about the data set we had been provided.” – Jasper Lam

Jasper lam, 4A, AFM

The two-phase BAC@MC competition challenges teams to analyze and extract business insights from a competition-specific dataset.

In Phase One, the student teams receive data and questions prior to the competition in February. Student teams work at their home institutions to analyze the dataset and are required to develop solutions to the questions posed. Teams then prepare and submit a poster summarizing their findings. When the students arrive for the 2-day event, the teams are to present the posters and are assessed by a panel of judges made up of faculty advisors.

During Phase Two, the teams are provided with additional questions and data. Each team have approximately 20 hours to compile an analysis on the new data to present to a panel of industry practitioners the following day.

Interested in SAF programs? Check out our Future Students website. Plus, see how other University of Waterloo students have gone #BeyondIdeas