And I'm off once again.....

It seems like I have my greatest posts right from the airport...... Considering I don't fly very often I find this very saddening! But I guess what else is there to do when you are waiting for your 1240 flight to depart and it is 1120 am. (Yes Yes I got here too early!)

I am off to the University of Guelph to compete in my very first case competition! We will be competing against 14 other teams from around the world. The competition sounds very prestigious, being the International Agribusiness Sustainability Case Competition. Myself and three students from the University of Lethbridge will be representing ULeth at this international competition. Our entire team has the advantage of being from an agricultural background, and three of us are studying Agriculture. Our fourth member is completing her Management degree in Finance. Our knowledge should make us unstoppable!

Almost every one I have told about this always asks me, "What is a case competition?" Well here is some background specific to the set-up of this competition.

When we get to Guelph, they will give us the case to analyze for 5 hours. We have no idea what the context of the case will be until 830 am on Friday morning. We will then present on our analysis some recommendations and how to implement these recommendations.

In the past month our Management professors have been helping us prepare. Once a week we have met to analyze a different type of "agricultural sustainability" case. They have included a small farm that is not sure how to plan for the future of their family business; a multi-national multi-billion dollar company that has outside lobby groups attacking their procedures of harvesting inputs; as well as a company that is not sure how to move forward in the "free-trade" market.

Each of these cases were analyzed for five hours and presented on in 20 minutes, with 10 minutes open for questions. This will be the context of our competition, which makes me nervous! I hope five hours will give us enough time! When we win the first round, we will be given more information on the case and must expand on our presentation and present on Saturday morning.

This competition also serves as a qualifier for a competition in Atlanta! (Not like we needed to add any more pressure to ourselves!)

We are extremely excited to be given this opportunity. We will be the first ULeth team to compete, so we have some high expectations to fulfill. This competition promises to challenge us with something we have never done before and provide numerous networking opportunities. We would like to send our greatest thanks to our coach Steve Craig, and our faculty advisors Dan Kazakoff and Danny LeRoy.  More thanks goes to Jeff Davidson, Edith Olsen and Pascal Ghazlian for watching our presentations and giving us feedback.

We would also like to thank everyone who made financial contributions to our team. At this point I do not want to name any names in case I forget someone. I promise to follow up in subsequent posts.

Wish us luck! :)