Beedie students place third in inaugural BTM Student Case Competition

Beedie students Pritesh Pachchigar and Ali Najaf

A team of two Beedie undergraduate students was awarded third place in the first ever BTM Student Case Competition, organized by the Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) in partnership with IT World Canada.

The competition asked student teams from Business Technology Management (BTM) programs across the country to perform a case study analyzing recommendations for smarter web analytics product offerings for a high-end, invite-only digital branding firm. The competition challenged students to apply their IT and business training to a real world situation they might face as BTM professionals.

Ali Najaf and Pritesh Pachchigar competed against teams from top universities across Canada, taking third place and winning a prize of $1,500. In preparing for the event they were coached by Nilesh Saraf, Associate Professor in Management Information Systems. The winners of the competition, which was sponsored by Rogers, IBM and Moneris, were Ryerson University, with University of Calgary coming in second.

“Participating in the case competition for the first time and achieving third place has been one of the best experience of my undergraduate time,” says Ali Najaf. “It gave us the opportunity to apply the knowledge that we have learned in classes to a real life business situation. We put in a lot of preparation for the competition and seeing the hard work paying off is remarkable. I am thankful to Pritesh for being a great team member and Professor Nilesh Saraf for helping us get ready for the event, and we are proud to have represented Beedie at the first annual BTM competition.”