Week 36: Holiday Break and the John Molson International Case Competition

Week 36 has ended and I find myself in Montreal representing Queen's at the John Molson International Case Competition. It has been an interesting week filled with ups and downs, but overall a very valuable experience.

The cases are written for the competition and therefore some of them need a little additional work before they could be published. However, since they are not published there is no way the people competing could have seen them before and this ensures a level and fair playing field. The judges are different for every round and come from the business community of Montreal with a few special representatives from abroad. Although the rubric for judging is standard it is ultimately up to the panel of judges to interpret it and therefore results can vary significantly. Although our team did not make it to the semi-finals to compete, I do believe that we had a very strong team and the training Queen's has given us to date allowed us to be excellent competitors. I firmly believe we had a team that given different circumstances could have been finalists.

It has been very interesting to meet all the different schools at the competition and to represent Queen's on such a public forum. There is too much to discuss in this posting, so I will write a more indepth posting at a later date.

Classes start again this Monday. We have an additional 21 students joining our ranks from international schools. In addition we will be missing several of our classmates that have departed to study aboard. Friday was a special "orientation" for these new students to help them integrate to our team-based learning style and our social culture.

Furthermore, there is already studying that needs to be completed for Monday's classes! From the looks of the electives I have chosen, the workload will be demanding. Time to dive back in and roll up my sleeves to get back to work!

Finally, there is unofficial information circulating that applications for next year's program are way up and the school is ahead of filling the positions available compared with previous years. This will make it tougher for late applicant's compared with previous years.