Tying it Together

First Hand Experience: Tying it Together

By Brian Price (MBA '11)



Brian Price (MBA '11) speaks during the advanced business seminar in Mangua, Nicaragua



Today is my favorite day of the Project Nicaragua trip.  It’s the day that really makes the whole trip worth it.  This is day 2 of the two-day seminar, and we have a chance to tie everything together for the business owners who participate in these seminars.  This trip is also the first in which we teach a case we all learned in business school – Allison Glass Works.  We typically offer a series of mini cases that may be a paragraph or two long in order to explain several concepts like accounting, pricing, and marketing.  But past feedback has told us the seminar participants want a bigger challenge.  So we gave the business owners the case to look at last night so that we could discuss it today.  We were very anxious to see how everyone would meet the challenge.

We were entirely blown away.

Business owners listen and engage in discussion about the advanced seminar business case study.



The participants were more engaged than I had ever seen.  They understood the material at least as well as any business student who had taken the case.  And they had less than 24 hours to analyze it.  We were all very impressed.  And the participants couldn’t have appreciated this change more – it really showed how to apply these business concepts in a real-world situation.  At the end of the day, we awarded certificates to the participants for completing the seminars.  It’s a learning experience on both parts, and I can’t wait to come back in March.