UB/Towson MBA Students Take on Real-Life Verizon Challenge
Nabeel Dean, Allison Keller, Gary Sachs, Ryan Solomon, and Thomas Volpe Jr., a team of students from the UB/Towson MBA program, which is offered jointly by Towson University’s College of Business and Economics and the University of Baltimore’s Merrick School of Business won a real-life case study competition. The competition was sponsored by Verizon.
The winning team was among seven teams competing in the case study competition, which was part of University of Baltimore professor Eusebio Scornavacca’s fall course “IT for Business Transformation.” The case study challenged the teams to work together completely online to develop an in-depth analysis of a business problem and develop a solution for the problem. The team’s analyses and proposals were reviewed by Professor Scornavacca and Manuel Sampedro, the president of Verizon’s mid-Atlantic area and a 1999 graduate of the University of Baltimore MBA program.
“When you work on a project like this, ‘effort’ becomes an interesting concept,” Sampedro told the students. “When I was just starting out, I had to learn the importance of demonstrating that I gave my best effort to my work. Obviously you gave that to the case study, and we at Verizon want to acknowledge that.”
Scornavacca explained how UB managed to offer a real-life case study as part of an online course: “We used video streaming technology combined with an interactive forum. So this initiative enabled a business to come and interact with my students in our 100 percent virtual classroom. The results from a survey conducted among students that participated in this experience showed that they enjoyed the hands-on approach of the case. Also, the interaction with a top executive from a prominent organization such as Verizon was extremely valuable to them.”
