Held by Simon Fraser University(SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, CaseIT aims to provide students around the world with unique platform to share their brilliant ideas about management and strategies. There are 20 teams from the world’s top business schools taking part in CaseIT competition, such as Singapore, USA, Hongkong, Indonesia and Australia. And we, team Advencer consisting of Xinyi Lee (Accounting),Xu Han (Finance),Jiayi Hong (Marketing) took part in this competition on behalf of Shantou University this year. We were divided to compete with Queen’s University, the champion last CaseIT competition, HEC Montreal and University of British Columbia in Group A. Faced with such strong competitors and high pressure, although we were lack of experience, we still spared no effort to do the case. Although we cannot reach the final round, we have performed the best.
[24 hours]
It is no doubt that it was the toughest 24 hours. Our team was still suffering from jet lag when the competition started at 8:30. We received our breakfast, paper and pen, and most importantly, our case.
Unfortunately, the case was about a charitable organization in Vancouver, which was actually a new area to us. We decided that we better get started as soon as possible.
At first we thought if we were not able to have a full night’s sleep, 5 hours would also be ok. However, as time went by, many problems left unsolved. We became nervous and worried. Small argument about timing and strategies occurred, but luckily we calmed down and figured out what went wrong.
We decided to give up the 5-hour sleep in our plan and ordered coffee and redbull to keep ourselves awake. It was the first time for us to stay up all night and the first time we found out 3 cups of coffee plus 2 bottles of redbull equals to 5 hours’ sleep. Actually, we felt better when knew that top Universities’ students also need to stay up all night and keep staying up until the competition ended. This means, on average, we are awake for 35 hours.
Honestly, we are not that confidence. We questioned our strategies. We were exhausted when we walk out our war room. And our hearts beat crazily when we step in the presentation room.
But we tried our best and no one even thought of giving up during the whole Spring boot camp and 24 hours inside war room.
[Social activities]
During our journey in Canada, SFU held three social activities for all the participants. In the evening, 14th February, the sponsor arranged all the competitors and coaches to different tables randomly, in order that we could know more friends at Welcome Dinner which was sponsored by SAP. Our team also knew many coaches and competitors from different school at different tables. Not only we could know about their universities, but we could also know their introductions of their countries when we communicated with them. In the second evening, Cooperate Evening, we talked with the sponsors and came to know different companies and advanced technology. We found that foreigners’ research in the field of VR and AR was very advanced. At the same time, our team received a lot of souvenirs from sponsors. In the last evening, after banquette we said goodbye to other teams and took photos with them for memory.
CaseIT competition provides us with a good opportunity to gain experience and enrich our lives. Although we didn’t win this competition, we knew the space we should improve ourselves through this experience and we would study harder and harder after coming back to school. Also, we sincerely thank our university for providing us with this opportunity and thank King Sir for his guidance.
