BYU CEO Chapter Wins Three National Awards

PROVO, Utah — Dec 14, 2007 — The Marriott School’s chapter of the Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization received high honors at the organization’s recent national conference, with three first-place chapter awards. The organization also honored a BYU student and an alumnus with individual awards.

“BYU has one of the dominant CEO chapters in the nation, because our students are very entrepreneurially minded,” says Gary K. Rhoads, Marriott School professor of marketing and the club’s faculty advisor. “Entrepreneurship is part of their culture of pioneering.”

Out of 1,200 students at more than 40 different universities, BYU received first place for “Best Business Plan”, “Best Chapter Marketing” and “Best in Teaching Entrepreneurship”. The chapter’s marketing award was recognition for the club’s record-setting “Rock, Paper, Scissors” tournament. A Guinness World Record is pending for the April event, which drew more than 700 participants.

In addition to the chapter awards, chapter member Travis Tidball, a junior from Chicago majoring in economics, won $1,500 as the third-place winner in the elevator pitch competition. And Marriott School alumnus Josh James, co-founder of Omniture, was named CEO’s young entrepreneur of the year.

With nearly 300 members, the BYU chapter of CEO is one of the largest in the organization, which “informs, supports, and inspires college students to be entrepreneurial and seek opportunity through enterprise creation,” according to the organization’s Web site.

The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, public management, information systems and entrepreneurship. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,000 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.