Fordham GBA Celebrates Winners of 2012 Business Challenge

The Fordham Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) honored the winners of its first Business Challenge at the Lincoln Center campus on June 14, making more than $200,000 in tuition scholarships for incoming students.

Andrew Adams, Nyambura Mbugua, and Meghan Barquinero will receive full scholarships to the college following their participation in a contest held in conjunction with the website studentcompetitions.com.

Adams, a 2009 Florida State University graduate, received his award to attend the college’s M.S. in Media Entrepreneurship program (MSEP) from Philip M. Napoli, Ph.D., professor of communication and media management.

Nyambura Mbugua, who graduated from State University of New York (SUNY) at Old Westbury in 2011, received her scholarship to attend the M.S. in Business Enterprise program (MBE) from Marcia H. Flicker, Ph.D., associate professor of marketing.

Meghan Barquinero, FCRH ’06, was awarded a scholarship for the M.S. in Marketing Intelligence (MSMI) by Peter Johnson, Ph.D., lecturer of marketing. Barquinero was making her return to Fordham, which is also her father’s alma mater.

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A partial scholarship and admission to the new M.S. in Business Analytics program (MSBA) was given to Andrea Gallego, a 2011 graduate of SUNY Stony Brook.

Second and third place awards were also given to students applying for the MSEP and MBE programs. In addition to the scholarships, two industry internships/workshops were awarded.

David A. Gautschi, Ph.D., dean of GBA, told attendees that opening up the admission process to an online contest was a new concept for the college, one that showed promise.

Entrants were asked to solve and present a real-world business case, and their submissions were open to the public for voting. Submissions were vetted by Fordham faculty and by volunteer experts from private industry.

Robert Lyngman, co-founder of the Stockholm-based studentcompetitions.com, noted that the contest, which ran during the month of May at fordhambusinesschallenge.com, attracted 390 participants; 20 of whom submitted entries. There were 525 votes cast for the winners.

In addition to touting the collaboration between Student Competitions and Fordham, Dean Gautschi said the new four programs illustrate the way GBA is shifting the focus of its programs to reflect the needs of the global marketplace.

“The masters programs that are pointed at specific career paths are really instrumental to GBA’s strategy to respond to today’s global business environment. Media entrepreneurship, marketing intelligence, and business analytics are coming out this year; last year we launched global finance, business enterprise, 3 continent Master’s in Global Management and investor relations, next year we will launch human resource management, applied statistics, and possibly credit risk management,” he said.

“It is going to be a village, so to speak, and we want all of our students to interact with each other to learn from each other.”
Integrating problem solving into the admissions process may also be beneficial when evaluating international students, he said. Half of GBA’s incoming class in September will hail from outside the United States.

Gautschi told the winners that it would be their challenge to reap the “benefits of interacting with people who come from places you might not even know on the map.”