While there haven't been many athletic accomplishments for Golden Bears and Pandas student-athletes over the last 13 months due to the pandemic, it hasn’t stopped them from excelling in their other pursuits.

One such individual is second-year Golden Bears tennis athlete, and Alberta School of Business student Shyam Srinivasan. Srinivasan and his team from the Faculty of Business became just the second team ever from the University of Alberta to win the John Molson Undergraduate Case Competition (JMUCC) in March.

The JMUCC is the world's largest undergraduate case competition, with the 2021 event featuring 28 Universities from 15 countries. The 2021 competition was also the first ever fully digital event in the history of JMUCC.

The University of Alberta also won this event in 2011, and placed third in 2016. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology placed second behind Srinivasan and his team last month, with the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management placing third.

We caught up with Srinivasan recently to discuss this tremendous accomplishment:

Tell us more about the JMUCC Competition, and the three cases your team needed to complete.

JMUCC is an international case competition where each university sends a team of four students to represent them. The competition had a total of 28 teams, and these teams were split up into seven divisions consisting of four teams each.

The general format of a case competition is, all teams are given a write-up on a specific problem that a certain business is facing, and they are given a restricted timeframe within which they have to solve the case and present it to the judges virtually. JMUCC was a slightly larger competition, and so it was three-pronged. We had to complete a 3-hour case, 5-hour case, and a 24-hour case throughout the week, and all these cases revolved around business strategy, technology deployment, and Mergers & Acquisitions – topics that are very relevant to the COVID-affected business environment.

For each case, we were given scores by judges, and the team that had the highest score within each division proceeded to the final round. Our team ended up placing first within our division for all three cases, and we were fortunate enough to place first in the overall competition as well.

What did it mean to you to not only represent the University of Alberta, but also place first overall?

It certainly was a great feeling to put the University of Alberta's name on the map and increase its recognition on a global scale. Prior to the competition, my team had devoted several hours to doing practice cases and improving our case-solving skills with our coach Doug Leong, and it was very rewarding that the results reflected the hard work we had all put in.

I see a lot of similarities in case competitions and sports, as you have to put in lots of effort and mentally prepare yourself adequately in order to succeed in the competition. It is a privilege to be representing your university, whether it be in academics or in sports, and so it certainly meant a lot.

What are some of your career goals, and how do you think competition help with that?

I don't particularly have an overarching professional goal that I work towards, but I know that I would like to pursue a career in finance or consulting down the road. Case competitions help you build problem-solving skills that are necessary to succeed in those careers, and so I would say experiences like these certainly help in career-building.