Southampton Students finalists in IBM UBC competition

A team of undergraduate students from the University of Southampton recently made it to the final of the IBM Universities Business Challenge (UBC) taking 5th place.

The UBC offers a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to improve their knowledge of business putting their theory into practice and developing skills in team-working and leadership. 280 teams from universities and colleges across the UK took part in the challenge, competing to achieve maximum profit, acquire new business and enhance customer satisfaction.

The Southampton team had to become management consultants for a series of realistic, simulated companies, including a brewery, a hotel and a perfume business. They had to make critical business decisions to enhance the performance of the company. Captained by second year MEng Ship Science student, Hieu Le the team included Aleksander Lidtke, MEng Aeronautics & Astronautics: Spacecraft Design; Artur Lidtke, BEng Ship Science; Kareena Pooi Yee Vun, BSc Mathematics with Actuarial Science and Thao P. Nguyen, Bsc Mathematics with Economics.

Team Captain Hieu comments: “Through UBC I have learnt important skills in leadership, organising and team work as well as getting a better understanding of running a business in both the manufacturing and service industries. We have learned to work with uncertainty and ambiguity.

“We took onboard the advice given to us to at the start to ‘never give up’, so when we made the wrong decision in the first trading period we picked ourselves up and made a better decision in the following trading periods taking us from 10th place to 5th place.”