Rutgers MBA Students Place Third in National Healthcare Case Competition
A team of five MBA students from the Rutgers School of Business Newark/New Brunswick earned third place at the Kellogg School of Management’s healthcare and biotech case competition. The Rutgers team included second year MBA students Rema Bitar, Sarah Kruse, Michelle Finn, Denise Kubata, and Mitchell Ezra. The team members had strengths in a variety of different areas, including supply chain management, finance, marketing, and pharmaceutical management.
The Rutgers students competed against teams from top schools around the globe, including Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management in Canada, the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. The first place team was from the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley, while the second place team was from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
The Rutgers team included students with significant experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Kruse worked for a clinical research organization for three years before business school. Mitchell Ezra and Rema Bitar both worked as research scientists in large pharmaceutical companies before deciding to pursue their MBAs. Michelle Finn worked for the medical device maker Covidien and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. Denise Kubata worked as a pharmacist for a decade before entering Rutgers’ MBA program.
The case was atypical for a healthcare business case competition. The Rutgers students and the other competing teams had to develop a strategy to help reduce childhood pneumonia in Uganda, instead of solving a manufacturing quandry or planning a new product launch.
Sarah Kruse said the team was pleased with the topic of the case competition: “We were all surprised, but it was a pleasant surprise. It was so multi-faceted and it had a human interest element to it. It also seemed incredibly applicable.”
