Student Competitions Put UNK on the Map

Ever wonder if you really can have the best of both worlds? If you ask the UNK students who recently participated in a couple of major competitions, they’ll tell you that their school has figured out how to use the coziness of small class size to their advantage. These University of Nebraska at Kearney students were recently able to prove that you don’t have to attend a large university to compete with one. 

Thanks to the experiential learning ubiquitous in classrooms across UNK’s campus, these two groups of students put what they do on a daily basis to use while competing against students from larger universities. While these competitions were not part of their course requirements, these students were able to not only utilize what they’ve learned in class but also gain a better understanding of how to apply what they will ultimately use in their future professions. According to Interior and Product Design student Abby Mieras, the competition she attended “very much connected to everything” she does in class. 

For these students, three who are majoring in Construction Management (CM) and two studying Interior and Product Design (IPD), traveling to Las Vegas to attend the National Association of Homebuilders yearly competition validated the work they’ve done all semester. Even though their work for this competition was independent of their classwork, this group of students met weekly from September to February to prepare to compete. 

The team consisted of CM students Alex Alba, Mitchell Knapp, and Keenan Torres as well as IPD students Avery Day and Abby Mieras. Sponsored by Dr. Jared Burgoon, these students worked hard to learn what is required to build a custom home. According to Mieras, they learned how to “build the house from the ground up.” After receiving a Problem Statement in September, the team was given a location for this project along with a budget of one million dollars. They completed a market analysis, a preconstruction management plan, a construction management plan, a sales and marketing plan, and a financial and risk analysis. In mid-December, the team submitted their proposals to the judges who served as hypothetical investors for this project. They then worked together to create the presentations for February’s competition. 

As Mieras shared, this simulation “will be very helpful going forward” as she prepares for her future career. She and Avery Day quickly realized that they needed to work with the Construction Management members of the team to understand the entirety of their project. Grateful for this experience, an extension of the experiential learning taught in her classes, Mieras stated that she realized she had fallen “way more in love with what (she’s) studying.” 

Other College of Business and Technology students had a similar experience this year. A group of four business students went to Lincoln, Nebraska in February to compete at the Tenaska Business Challenge, a competition sponsored by one of the leading private companies in the energy industry. The team, sponsored by Mr. Travis Hollman, consisted of Chloe Dakan, Bethia Hamilton, Omar Sanchez, and Brett Steinke.

Chloe Dakan, a senior business student who is majoring in marketing, states that making a fake business plan for a fleet of electrical cars for this competition “solidified what (she’s been) doing” in her classes. She stated that her team has “realized that choosing UNK was the best option for us” because they were not afraid to put to use, at this competition, the type of hands-on learning they experience in their college classes. 

As Bethia Hamilton shared, their team’s project was “more outside-the-box than what every other university” went with. This group had a different mindset from the beginning, a team mentality that she feels will be useful to her when she enters her field of management. 

According to Hamilton, she walked away from this experience excited that “everything (she had) learned, (she) was able to apply” to this project. Crediting experiences at UNK such as Dr. Daniel Chaffin’s MGT400-Entrepreneurship class as one of “the benefits of going to a smaller school,” she explained how she felt prepared to “participate in larger scale” experiences like this competition. 

Thanks to the experiential learning that’s the hallmark of UNK, these College of Business and Technology students were able to take what they’ve enjoyed in their small classes and compete well with students from much larger universities. Returning home to UNK, both teams credit what they learn on a daily basis with helping them create and share presentations that not only impressed the judges but gave everyone something to think about.