By Teri H.P. Nguyen
Daily Bruin Contributor
A team of UCLA students will face off against teams from 15
other universities to see who can provide the best consultations
for a fictitious business firm in peril, Thursday in Illinois.
The Business Consulting Challenge, sponsored by Arthur Anderson,
is an effort to provide students with firsthand experience in the
field of business consulting, a spokesperson said.
Anderson, a global accounting, consulting and financial firm, is
currently being sued for fraud alongside Enron Corp. Anderson
plaintiffs allege that the consulting firm did not report knowing
that Enron released numerous false financial statements, thus
misleading stock-purchasers.
Last week, 14 local teams from UCLA competed for the position to
go to the national tournament Thursday, but only one team met the
challenge: Charu Mathur, Jeff Marks, Alissa Ko, Lai Yar Cheung and
Kristina Trinh.
Members of the Undergraduate Business Society, the team
competitors have thoughts of pursing careers in consulting after
graduation.
The team was awarded a $1,000 grand prize and the opportunity to
win another $5,000, as well as a $20,000 scholarship for the
university in the national competition to be held Thursday and
Friday at the Anderson’s Center for Professional Education in
St. Charles, Ill.
“The competition is a big commitment,” said Charu
Mathur, team captain and third-year economics and international
development studies student. “But it was good exposure to
consulting.”
The main focus of this annual event, said Anderson spokesperson
Richard Maganini, is to “give students an opportunity to see
the challenge consultants have.”
“Companies around the world depend on consultants to help
them meet the many challenges they’re facing today,”
said Luis Tredicce, Anderson’s managing partner for business
consulting in North America.
In the local tournament at UCLA, where over 63 undergraduates
competed, each team was to develop a customer loyalty strategy,
creating such plans that would ensure good customer relations
within the company.
Mathur and her team had to prepare a coherent, creative and
effective strategy. After that, each team was to give a
presentation to a panel of Anderson judges posing as the executive
board of the company in play, followed by a question and answer
segment.
According to Joel Stern, senior recruiter for Anderson
competition, each team was judged based on the process, overall
strategy and presentation of their proposed plan.
The simulation attempts to give a comprehensive understanding of
what goes into giving advice to firms, Stern said.
“It was a well simulated event,” said Julie Chuang,
a second-year business economics student. “It allowed me to
test to see if consulting was right for me.”
Although Chuang’s team placed second in the local
tournament, similar sentiments about the competition’s
effectiveness were shared.
The program tests a number of skills that consultants are
expected to have, namely communications, problem solving,
multimedia and technological competency, research and teamwork,
Stern said.
Now, the five UCLA competitors will fly out Wednesday morning
anticipating an intense competition with 576 other students, 144
teams from 15 leading universities including UC Berkeley and the
University of Southern California.
“We don’t know what the situation will be,”
Mathur said of the national competition. “But we sort of know
what to expect now that we have an idea of what consulting is
like.”
The Business Consulting Challenge started five years ago at
UCLA. Due to good relations with UCLA and the idea of someone in
the Anderson office, UCLA was selected to host the local
tournaments before the program gained popularity and rose to a
national level three years ago, Stern said.
The lawsuit against Anderson will have no impact on the
competition, said Stern, the senior recruiter and spokesman for the
firm.
Despite Anderson’s not-so-positive media attention of
late, there has been no negative responses from the schools as a
result of the Enron situation, Stern said.
“It’s a unique opportunity (for the students) to
play the role of the consultant and put their skills to work to
solve very real business problems,” Tredicce said.