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Interdisciplinary Team of Students Wins Isenberg Inclusive Leadership Summit Case Competition
An interdisciplinary team of students from three UMass schools and colleges comprised the winning team at the recently held Inclusive Leadership Summit Case Competition, hosted by the Isenberg School of Management Oct. 18 through 19. Two College of Social and Behavioral Sciences students, Aarat Satyavolu, resource economics, and Teja Kadewari, economics, were joined by Dhruv Khurana, College of Information and Computer Sciences, and Isenberg’s Cristina Roselli, to take the competition’s top prize.
The Case Competition, presented by Ernst & Young (EY), challenged participants to demonstrate best practices in diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, with teams asked to consider how a beverage packaging company could expand viably into a new country. Competitors took into account the nuances of such an expansion, what Satyavolu calls the “economics of how a team should function,” such as working with contractors, distributors and administrators.
Satyavolu and his team brought different areas of knowledge to the table, as well as fresh perspectives that helped generate innovative solutions to increasingly complex problems. Khurana computed geographic analyses and interpreted demographic trends, while Roselli calculated how different groups of people respond to different market trends. Satyavolu, a budding entrepreneur, had previously won Best Overall at the HackPrinceton Fall 2018 hackathon, and has opened a UMass Amherst branch of the social impact consulting provider 180 Degrees Consulting, which includes his Case Competition teammates Kadewari, Khurana, and Roselli.
In addition to a deeper understanding of inclusion and diversity in the workplace, stronger presentation skills, professionalism and access to a larger network of relationships, each of the winning team members received a plaque and $200.