STEVENS POINT, Wis. (WSAW) – University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point business students are gaining real-world experience while helping their community through the school’s “Case in Point” competition.
The program pairs student groups with local nonprofits for consulting projects lasting three to four weeks. Students compete for cash prizes while providing business solutions to community organizations.
“So what we do is we pair up student groups with a non-profit in the community and they do a consulting project for three to four weeks to give, not just applied experience for our students, hands-on solving a real world problem, but also giving back to the community,” said Kevin Neuman, head of the UWSP Sentry School of Business and Economics.
Students tackle dental provider recruitment
This year marked the third annual competition. Five teams from the Sentry School of Business worked with Noble Community Clinics to address recruitment and retention of dental providers.
“For us, it was for recruitment and retention of dental providers, which has been a real need, especially here in the rural communities of Wisconsin,” said Ivan Coziahr, chief operating officer of Noble Community Clinics.
The student groups presented their final solutions today, with the winning team receiving $2,500.
“At the end of the day, from every single team we could pick and choose something we could implement in our own organization, not only to help us but to help the industry as a whole,” Coziahr said.
Winning student values real-world problem solving
Sophia Bley, a junior business administration major, was part of the winning group. She said the experience provided invaluable real-world skills.
“It’s also just great problem-solving skills. Like, things might not have gone the way we wanted them to in the research phase or the presentation phase, but just working with what you’re given is one of the things we learned too,” Bley said.
Noble Community Clinics will continue to implement solutions from the project, including a more staff-facing social media presence.
The competition provides students with hands-on experience that mirrors professional consulting work.
“Our mission is to create career-ready graduates and to do that, you need to give students hands-on, real-world learning experiences,” Neuman said.
“To have the ability to do this and work with real businesses and at the end of the day, win a little bit of money as a poor college student, the university and ‘Case in Point’ have done a great job in promoting this,” Bley said.
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