BYU Earns Top Spot at Business Language Case Competition

PROVO, Utah – Feb 08, 2013 – Brigham Young University teams captured top Chinese and Spanish honors at the 2012 Business Language Case Competition, the only business language competition of its kind in the nation.

Students were given two weeks to prepare a business plan and presentation examining whether a product should enter a new country and how it could gain an advantage in a new marketplace. First place and $1,000 went to the team that conveyed the best case analysis in each language category.

“It was a great experience to put into practice the things we’ve learned in class and to apply business principles in a professional setting,” says Tyson Bryan, a senior finance major from Las Vegas and member of the winning Spanish team.

Bryan and his teammates, Jeremy Huppe, a senior Latin American studies major from Kennewick, Wash., and Greg Zollinger, a senior finance major from Idaho Falls, Idaho, spent early mornings and late nights putting together a championship-worthy case.

“It was great to see all of the hard work and long hours that went into preparing for the competition pay off,” Zollinger says.

The trophy winners for the Chinese division were BYU students Tyson Anderson, a pre-management senior from Gilbert, Ariz.; Zack Wester, an Asian studies senior from Horseshoe Bend, Idaho; and Chris Weinberger, a senior Chinese major from Draper, Utah.

Before receiving the case, students utilized resources available to them on campus to prepare for the event.

“We met with professors from the Marriott School and the Chinese department and worked a few practice cases with them,” Wester says. “We learned a lot of techniques to help us identify the problem within a case and build an argument off of that.”

The BYU-hosted competition is sponsored by the Whitmore Global Management Center CIBER and Same Day Translations, a local Utah company. The University of Washington CIBER helped co-sponsor the Chinese portion of the competition and the University of Miami CIBER co-sponsored the Spanish section.

A dozen teams came to Provo from 10 universities across the United States to compete against one another in the sixth year of the competition. Indiana University claimed second place in both language divisions while Arizona State University placed third in Chinese and American University placed third in Spanish. Rutgers University, University of Pittsburgh and the University of Rhode Island were among other schools competing.

“The case competition really shows how relevant language skills are in today's economy,” says Jeff Carlson, an economic consulting major from Indiana University. “It is really the only case competition where you get to use foreign languages, and I now feel much more confident in my ability to use Spanish in the real world.”

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.