The Mendoza College of Business and IBM teamed up Wednesday for the first-ever Notre Dame MBA Case Competition, a contest with the underlying aim of increasing the number of Notre Dame alums employed by the corporation.
Roughly 40 competition entrants were presented with a management situation involving the Mercury Computer Systems and asked to address the issue in the form of a written analysis. Six finalist teams were then selected to present their ideas to a panel of judges made up of Mendoza faculty members and current IBM employees.
The winner of the contest, Notre Dame graduate student Kevin Suhanic of Cleveland, was rewarded with an all-expense paid trip to IBM's headquarters in New York. There, he will be given the opportunity to interact with IBM executives - a crucial element of his job search.
Suhanic's reward is representative of the relationship between Notre Dame and IBM.
The software company is comprised of numerous small subsets, each with the foremost goal of ranking first or second in their respective market. In order to accomplish this goal IBM actively seeks intelligent and decisive individuals, Michael Riegel, director of On Demand Marketing and Strategy for IBM Global Services, said.
"We're trying to identify the new leaders of IBM," Riegel said.
The overall success of this collaboration has already led competition organizers to begin thinking about future contests.
"On the plane coming in [to South Bend] we discussed how we wanted to do this again next year," said Riegel. "We were overwhelmed with the results."
