Rutgers University MBA students Mittal Shah and Sonal Patel were sitting next to one another in Rutgers Business School’s Bove Auditorium as the winners of the annual biopharmaceutical case competition were announced.
Within a few minutes, they knew that Kellogg had won third place. And then, Wharton was announced as the second-place winner.
The women looked at one another, nervously wondering where the team from Rutgers Business School would place. “It’s going to be all or nothing,” Patel said softly, waiting for the next winner to be announced.
When Rutgers was declared the first place winner, Shah and Patel leaped out of their chairs and hugged one another. The room erupted with applause for the home team, which also included Michael Kwatkoski, Paul Rosiak and Kinushuk Saxena, the team’s sole first-year MBA student. All five students are pursuing MBAs in Rutgers Business School’s top-ranked Pharmaceutical Management program.
The third annual biopharmaceutical case competition at Rutgers attracted teams from the nation’s leading business schools, including Wharton, Columbia and Kellogg. Teams also represented Michigan State University, MIT Sloan, Duke, Penn State’s Smeal College of Business and the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business.
After just a few years, Rutgers Business School’s case competition has become known as an important one for MBA students hoping to move into careers in the healthcare and pharmaceutical fields. The competition has multiple company sponsors, intensifying the networking aspect of the day and the potential for students to impress major companies.
Professor Mahmud Hassan, director of the Lerner Center for Pharmaceutical Management, said Rutgers is trying to model its case competition after the well-respected one hosted by Kellogg School of Business.
Hassan said next year he hopes to increase the number of teams that participate and to attract international schools to the event. Rutgers has the potential to do that because of the consortium of company sponsors, he said.
“Having more companies makes it more attractive to the teams,” he said. “The students get to network with more companies, and the companies get to see the talent of the students.” This year, the sponsoring companies were Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Campbell Alliance, Eisai, Herspiegel Consulting, Novartis and Novo Nordisk.
“For both sides, it’s a win,” Hassan said.
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