McCombs Team Wins SEC MBA Case Competition

A Texas McCombs team took first place at the 13th annual Southeastern Conference MBA Case Competition hosted by Texas A&M University in March

The first-place team was made up of Andrés Campano, Payton DeLong, Soham Mukherjee, and Swati Pandey.

The competition, established in 2013, gives SEC business schools an opportunity to showcase their students’ skills at solving simulated, real-world problems faced by a large corporation. Dell Technologies served as this year’s case client.

“It was a really cool experience to see how it started and how it finished,” said Campano, a second-year MBA student at McCombs. “We were talking about how it was cool to see each of us have our different niches and different kind of strong suits and that they paired well together, so credit to TNT and McCombs for picking us and matching us the right way.”

The teams had approximately 24 hours to prepare their recommended solutions and present them to company executives in divisional and final rounds of competition. Dell Technologies executives considered each presentation, identifying four teams to advance to the finals and ultimately ranking the final four teams. The students’ identities and university affiliations were anonymous to the judges to ensure
impartiality.

“It was definitely a transformative experience,” said Pandey, a first-year MBA student at McCombs. “We have barely slept as we worked all through the night on this presentation. I feel much more confident just with the skills built these last two days. It was a great learning experience as we got to connect as a team too. I’ll be taking a lot back from this weekend.”

Although team advisers could not communicate with their students once the case was presented, they observed the presentations and offered support after the competition
concluded.

“As a lifelong educator, it’s always really rewarding to see my students be at their full potential,” said Bitia Buenrostro, senior academic program adviser for the Full-Time MBA program at McCombs. “Seeing them work together as four students from very different backgrounds with all the adrenaline and just 24 hours to work was really cool.”

 The winning team received a $10,000 prize.