Four Goodman students have made it to the final round of the prestigious Inter-Collegiate Business Competition that will be hosted at Queen’s University in January.

The preliminary round, which took place in October, saw teams of Goodman students compete in the areas of accounting, business policy, ethics, finance, human resources and marketing. More than 30 business schools from around the world traditionally compete in the early round. After receiving a case, students had three weeks to submit a full written report outlining their analyses and recommendations for the given business problem.

BBA students Sean Bouwers and Bryan Dizon and BAcc students Holly Arruda and Mitch Minor were among the top six teams selected from across Canada in the finance and accounting categories.

For Dizon, competing in I.C.B.C. is a valuable learning opportunity, even though it meant some late nights. “In order to properly analyze our case in the preliminary round, we had to do extensive research on the industry,” he says. “It forced us to do a lot of self-learning which was much more substantial than any other case I had learned from before. The chance to compete internationally and represent the Goodman School of Business at that level makes it worth all the time we committed to our report.”

The four students will travel to Kingston, Ont. to compete with their counterparts in the final weekend of the competition. The international event, which will see the top six teams selected from the preliminary round compete in each category, will put students’ business acumen and presentation skills to the test by putting a five-hour time limit on a new case resolution portion. Students will present their analyses and recommendations before a judging panel of business experts, which has included top-level industry professionals from KPMG, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and Google in the past.

The teams are coached by Prof. Todd Green and Prof. Herb MacKenzie, both from the Marketing, International Business and Strategy Department. Prof. Green will accompany the two finalist teams in January.

MacKenzie will accompany a team of students to the Global Family Enterprise Case Competition held at the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business during the same weekend. BBA students James Fioretti, Ashley Howard and Deeksha Sharma will be competing in that event, the first time a Goodman team has been invited.