UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A unique collaboration between a student from the Penn State Smeal College of Business and a student from the College of Engineering’s Engineering Leadership Development Program produced a successful result in a recent case competition.
Lydia Mabamije, a third-year marketing major and digital media trends and analytics minor who is a member of Smeal’s Business Ethics Case Team, and Roman Nagirniak, a third-year electrical engineering major and engineering leadership development minor, advanced to the Elite 8 out of 71 universities in the fifth annual Lockheed Martin Ethics in Engineering Case Competition.
“The Engineering Leadership Development program was proud to partner with the Tarriff Center for this competition. Our program is rooted in providing multidisciplinary engineering design and leadership opportunities for our students, and we have been extremely excited to engage at the next level through collaboration with Smeal,” said Paul Mittan, professor of practice and director of engineering leadership development in the College of Engineering’s School of Engineering Design and Innovation.
“Lockheed Martin has been a longtime supporter of our program, and competitions like this serve to promote the importance of cross-discipline collaborations in both academia and industry. This was an extremely valuable learning experience for us all, and we look forward to continuing to grow our partnership with the Tarriff Center in the future.”
On the first day of the competition, Mabamije and Nagirniak advanced past the preliminary round as the 14th seed in a March Madness-style bracket competition. The duo defeated Rochester Institute of Technology, Michigan State and Rice.
This year’s case highlighted two companies under contract to develop an unmanned aerial vehicle training system and grappled with the impact of meeting cyber security requirements. Teams competed head to head in a negotiation-style competition, debating and negotiating terms about how best to solve an ethics/engineering/business issue between a DoD contractor/subcontractor and the government agency contracting the system. Each round after the first two, teams were presented with a twist and had three minutes to debrief.
The team was eliminated in the fifth round of competition.
In addition to Mittan, Michelle Darnell, Smeal’s director of honor and integrity and director of the Tarriff Center for Business Ethics and Social Responsibility, served as one of the team’s faculty advisers.
The competition was held at Lockheed Martin’s corporate headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland.