Pamplin College hosts diversity case competition for undergraduates
The Pamplin College of Business is hosting a diversity case competition for its undergraduate students.
“The competition is designed to provide students a great opportunity to develop important professional skills, such as analyzing and responding quickly to complex business issues involving diversity,” said Lynette Wood, an assistant professor of accounting and information systems who chairs Pamplin’s Multicultural Diversity Committee and is coordinating the competition.
Student teams, she said, will work on a solution to a diversity case and present their recommendations to a panel of judges comprising senior executives. The top three teams will win cash prizes of $2,000, $1,000, and $500.
The deadline for team registrations is Tuesday, March 17. The case will be distributed on Tuesday, March 24. The competition’s preliminary round will be held on Monday, March 30, with the final round the following day. Interested students, Wood said, may learn more about the competition — including the guidelines, rules, and judging information — and register their teams online.
The competition is sponsored by the college and its diversity committee, Business Diversity Center, MBA program, and undergraduate program, as well as the university’s Office for Equity and Inclusion and accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young.
The competition is an example of Pamplin’s commitment to diversity programs, Wood said. The college has included diversity-related goals in its strategic plan for several years and has sponsored the diversity committee, comprising faculty and student members, since 1987. In the fall of 1997, it adopted the “Diversity as a Core Value” statement, written by the committee and discussed and approved by Pamplin faculty and staff. More recently, the college created an award for diversity excellence to honor faculty for outstanding contributions to the college’s diversity programs.
