THUNDER BAY – In the real world, accountants have weeks and months to come up with a solution to save a floundering bank.
Students from Lakehead University’s business administration program were given an hour.
It was a challenge, said Mitchell Argue, one of four accounting students who took part in the ACHIEVE Competition recently in Toronto, where they finished second out of 16 participating schools.
“We kind of had to apply stuff from all different areas of what we’ve learned,” Argue said on Friday, six days after returning from the Toronto competition and conference.
“There’s the accounting technical and the qualitative. When you think about the math and some of the technology and ethics that were involved, it was hard to do in one hour. They give you a three-page case.”
The group, which also included third-year student Laura Siegers and fourth-years Bonnie Donaghy and Adam Kok, had to read the case study, which asked them to look into a bank’s economic performance and decide whether the owners should stick it out or try to sell.
“A lot of it definitely came to prioritizing the main issues of the case. All of us read through the case and came up with the main issues of the case and we all started addressing them on a priority basis,” Kok said.
Once those issues were figured out, it was a matter of sorting through each team member’s strength in order to come up with the solution.
“There were things like doing more of a mathematical calculation about what they should do, and some qualitative situations, like in real life, would you actually consider doing this,” said Donaghy, who plans to start working in the field this spring.
“We broke that down amongst us, based on who was best in what subject areas. Then we started really drilling into that and working on those parts.”
Siegers said they just put their heads down and got to work.
Still, she was not expecting a second-place finish, even though as recently as 2018 Lakehead University won the competition.
“I was just really proud of us. I thought that we really pulled it together really well. Everyone had their strengths and I was definitely really happy and proud of everyone,” Siegers said.
“I think one of the main reasons was our professors at Lakehead really helped us and gave us such an amazing basis of our knowledge.”
The win comes with an achievement plaque and a $1,000 prize for the students to share.
Business administration dean David Richards said the school is proud of the team’s accomplishments.
“Their performance reflects our faculty’s mission to enable students to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful in their chosen careers.”
