UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State student chapter of the National Organization for Business and Engineering (NOBE) hosted more than 80 participants from eight universities — as well as industry members — Feb. 12-14 for the 2016 NOBE National Conference at the Nittany Lion Inn.
Sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Penn State, the conference featured speakers from both academia and industry who addressed some of the many opportunities and overlap in workplace skills that exist for students interested in the business and engineering sectors.
The three-day conference also featured a case competition, in which a total of $2,000 in prize money was awarded to the first-, second-, third- and fourth-place teams.
The schools that participated in the conference were Drexel University, McGill University (Canada), Penn State Behrend, Penn State, University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, University of Pittsburgh and University of Texas-Austin.
“Engineering students with a business mindset and business students with an understanding of engineering are what corporations look to hire today,” said Andrew Quinn, president of NOBE’s national executive board. “The synergies created from the merger of the business and engineering mindsets were on full display at the 2016 NOBE National Conference at Penn State.”
Speakers covered such topics as mega-trends in business and industry, graduate school options for business and engineering majors, entrepreneurship, and complimentary skills for engineers in the business sector.
“The NOBE National Conference at Penn State was an impressive display of the power of collaboration,” said speaker and Penn State alumnus Joseph C. Atkinson, U.S. advisory leader for the entertainment, media and communications practice at PwC. “Students across engineering and business disciplines from the nation’s leading universities actively challenged each other to think strategically and tackle the complex problems facing our society and business. The future is in great hands with these students.”
The Harvard Business Review Case Study Competition on Feb. 13 was designed to challenge students by initiating the collaboration of systems thinking. The case focused on online apartment rental site Airbnb, which is exploring mechanisms to facilitate trust between guests and hosts following widely publicized complaints of destructive guests.
According to the study, which was published in 2011, “Flexible online reputation systems can collect and share information with ease, but Airbnb must decide which information guests and hosts should have to provide and how much flexibility each should have in selecting whom to do business with. A full-featured system could provide all the information users have been requesting, but would it be too complicated for routine use?”
Ten intercollegiate teams of four students were asked to leverage their talents and individual experiences in order to develop the most innovative and compelling solution to the panel of 10 judges.
“We incorporated a case competition to drive the intellectual collaboration between business and engineering mindsets,” said Mohammad AlZayed, president of the Penn State NOBE chapter and an industrial engineering student. “The exciting ideas we saw in the competition sets to prove the significance of exposing NOBE’s membership to case competitions, consulting projects and other real-world applications.”
After the 60-minute first round, the teams submitted their written reports to the judging panel. The judges identified the top four teams by predetermined criteria and called upon the finalists to present their solutions with a five- to seven-minute pitch, followed by questioning from the judging panel. The winning teams were announced by Janis Terpenny, professor and head of the Marcus department, and were presented with certificates and awards at the dinner ceremony that evening.
The first-place team was comprised of Penn State industrial engineering students Matt DiSanto and Janna Al Nabhani and University of Pittsburgh industrial engineering students Kelsey Metheny and Garret White. Each team member was awarded with $250 and a brass Nittany Lion trophy.