Goodman student Mikayla Zolis is on a winning streak.

Countless practice presentations, team meetings and case analysis preparation sessions paid off for the second-year BBA student who won three case competitions in the month of March.

Each competition involved business case analysis and team presentations before a judging panel of industry experts.

Zolis’s team, which included business students Amy Rudnicki and Alexa Pong, won the junior division of So You Think You Can Sell. The inaugural event, hosted by the Brock Marketing Association, aimed to help students’ analytical and problem solving skills.

The next day at the Goodman Consulting Competition, Zolis’s team won again, this time including business students Mohamad Hamade and Gerda Kruckauskaite. All participating teams worked for six weeks leading up to the competition in preparation. Their quest was to help a local organization in achieving a business objective. This year’s competition client was Brock Golf Course, which was recently purchased by Goodman graduate Andrew Julie (MBA ’05).

Zolis and her team met with Julie twice and worked to come up with a feasible solution to help him grow his business before pitching the recommendation to Julie and his wife, along with Glenn Stevens from the Goodman Consulting Group and employer partners Nathan Braun from EY and Christian Guirguis from KPMG.

Zolis had a break from competitions for a few days before diving back in to compete at Break the Case, an internal junior case competition organized by the Goodman Accounting Students’ Association and sponsored by CPA Ontario and Goodman’s CPA Research Excellence Centre. Zolis and her teammates, business students Eiraj Ali, Alyssa DiCienzo and Majid El-Assi, took home the first place prize. Professor Samir Trabelsi, director of Goodman’s CPA Ontario Research Excellence Centre, was on the judging panel and was impressed with the students’ presentations once again this year.

“Break the Case provides the most hands-on, realistic simulations of what it would be like to take on a specific role and pushes students to think outside the number-crunching accounting box,” he says.

“There is no doubt that Break the Case requires an enormous time commitment and a lot of effort, but the potential benefits can be quite substantial. Regardless of the outcome for each and every student, when it comes to the Break the Case competition, participation is definitely worthwhile. The CPA Research Excellence Centre is very happy to sponsor such a very productive event.”

Zolis, who worked part-time this year as a Junior Career Associate at the Goodman Career Development Office, says the most important thing she has learned this year is that all extracurricular experience works to students’ advantage in their job search.

“As long as you can communicate your experience in the right way, everything you do counts,” she said.

Internal Goodman case competition winners

Brock Finance and Investment Group’s Stock Pitch Challenge

• Tom Andriopoulos

Goodman Accounting Students’ Association’s Break the Case

• First place: Eiraj Ali, Alyssa DiCienzo, Majid El-Assi, Mikayla Zolis

• Second place: Naweed Chowdhury, Meagan Gloor, Katrina Karges, Jacob Murre

• Third place: Danyal Ahmed, Giwakar Chandrakumar, Justin Enns, Jayath Fernando

Goodman Accounting Students’ Association’s Goodman Consulting Competition

• Mohamad Hamade, Gerda Kruckauskaite, Mikayla Zolis

Brock Marketing Association’s So You Think You Can Sell

• Junior Division: Alexa Pong, Amy Rudnicki, Mikayla Zolis

• Senior Division: MJ Kisirye, Rhea Menon and Shubham Ranjan

Goodman Human Resource Management Association’s HR 101

• Kenneth Kooring and Jennifer Philpott