B-School Competitions
If it’s one thing you can be sure to get roped into while in business school, it’s case competitions. I’ve been lucky to work with some great teams while in school, and we put together great work that I’m really proud of!
Shout out to my amazing Hack-a-Startup teammates: Octavian Jordan, Karthik Venkateshan, Martin Phelan, and Anna Kathpal!
CMU Hack-a-startup, 2017 — 1st place
Hack-a-Startup is dear to my heart. It’s an annual startup competition put on by the Graduate Entrepreneurship Club that brings students together from all across Carnegie Mellon to take ideas to business concepts in one weekend.
I went to the competition with just an idea and no team to work on it. On the first day, I pitched my idea to bring AI into the gym in front of everyone and recruited four awesome teammates to work with me over the weekend. We interviewed dozens of customers, sized the market, analyzed the competition, and even mocked up some prototypes.
On Sunday, I pitched to a panel of investor judges. My product, Smartbell, was no longer just an idea but a fleshed-out startup concept that combined sensor technology, computer vision, and AI to automate workout tracking and improve gym management. We ultimately placed first in the competition and received a huge dose of validation to keep working on the business. You can read more about Smartbell here.
Tepper Tech Innovation challenge, 2017 — National Finalist
Each year, the Tepper Business & Technology Club hosts a nationwide case competition called the Tepper Tech Innovation Challenge (TIC). In 2017 I formed a team with three of the most talented people at Tepper.
As soon as the prompt — The Future of Autonomous Technology — of the competition was announced, we got to work brainstorming dozens of ideas that we could pull from. We decided to design an autonomous grocery store delivery service that primarily served people in food deserts with limited access to healthy food options. We ran away with the local Tepper round of the competition and went on to Nationals where we faced seven other teams from top-tier MBA programs from around the country in a fun, but grueling, finals. See more about the idea here.
Shout out to my amazing TIC teammates: Andrea Caralis, Katie Glass, and Esme Rhine
Shout out to my amazing teammates: Lama Alfulaij, Jim Gibbs, Ayman Alalao, and Amy Smallman
Pittsburgh mobiliti and Ford’s city of tomorrow challenge, 2018
In late 2018, I had the privilege of attending Mobiliti, a two-day collaborative conference designing the future of transportation for everyone. While there I learned about the tremendous transportation challenges faced by Pittsburgh residents, and, thanks to BCG Platinion MAYA’s design thinking best practices, worked with my team to arrive at a solution for Maria, a Pittsburgh woman who wakes up at 3 AM each day in order to ride three different buses to work each day.
After the conference, my team and I created a proposal for Ford’s City of Tomorrow Challenge. Our solution was to increase the data collected by the local transit authority, improve visibility of bus passengers at bus stops, and provide better communication between drivers and passengers throughout the network.