High School Competition!

At the beginning of this year, I was offered the cool opportunity through Eller Ambassadors to be in charge of Eller’s Second Annual High School Business Analytics Competition.  I said “yes” enthusiastically because I really loved being involved in different FBLA and Acadec competitions in high school and I loved the idea of being part of hosting one!

Pretty much the entire spring semester I have been meeting weekly with my adviser to plan the competition – everything from ordering tablecloths to coordinating with schools to eventually having 44 students from 10-12 local schools show up to compete!  I’ll admit it was a lot of work, and towards the end I was getting a little tired of putting in all of the extra effort, but alas, we powered through.

The event was last Friday and pretty much every moment from when I arrived at 8AM to when I left around 1:30 was quite a success!  The students arrived and were given a short presentation on marketing a presented with a case requiring them to come up with an innovative way to brand the U of A and Eller to prospective students.  The students were split into groups of four that were mixed with class, gender, and school.  They were then given about 1.5 hours to prepare their case and a presentation/powerpoint and then had the opportunity to present in front of judges.  The event ended with a complementary lunch and award presentation by our Associate Dean.  For only the second time it was done, the competition went pretty well!

The school administrators were very pleased with how smoothly the details went and how organized the event was, the associate dean was quite pleased with the turnout, and the students had fun (or at least appreciated the shirts we gave them)!  Over all, I am really thankful for the opportunity I had to coordinate the event and work with the students and teachers.  Seeing the competition play out well is something I really love, and I hope they ask me to do it again next year!

On another note, these past few years have been the years of “Hannah getting weird, random ailments because her body either hates her or hates Tucson.”  I thought I was done after discovering my allergy to mosquitos.  I thought I was done after pneumonia.  I thought I was done after mostly ridding myself of a 5 month cough.  But alas, my eye has now contracted an “irritation” from the climate and my contacts that resulted in another trip to campus health, eye ointment antibiotics, being prohibited from class, sunlight, and basically all activities for a day, and the wearing of glasses for who knows how long.  On the bright side, we caught it before it go reallyyyy terrible. On the bright side, Mike was super sweet and stayed home to keep me company all day yesterday and my eye is definitely doing better today!  I don’t want to think about what my next weird thing will be…