The University of Alabama

MBA students in the Manderson Graduate School of Business at The University of Alabama Culverhouse College of Commerce have returned from the recent 2017 National Black MBA Association/FCA US National Graduate Student Case Competition in Philadelphia as big winners. Beating out 41 teams from some of the country's top business schools, they earned the grand prize of $25,000 in scholarships.

A team of students from The University of Alabama's College of Communication and Information Sciences won a Bronze Pencil in the One Club's Young Ones College Competition and were selected for Honorable Mention in the Young Ones Client Pitch Competition. This is UA's first Pencil award. The Young Ones College Competition highlights great student work from around the world, awarding Gold, Silver and Bronze pencils to the top student work in advertising, design and interactive. Of the Young Ones competition's 70 finalists from 16 countries, only 24 finalists won pencils. The students' work is for Flight Plan, a fictional 501(c)3 organization that would work in partnership with the United Nations and Partners Global to turn the estimated 9.7 trillion unused frequent flier miles into physical, donatable items that could aid refugees around the world.

Five University of Alabama computer science seniors and members of the Association for Computing Machinery UA student chapter started a hacking competition this semester that they hope will become a yearly event. CrimsonHacks is a hackathon, or a weekend-long invention challenge. The 24-hour event took place on the third floor of the Ferguson Center, starting at 1 p.m. March 25 and ending at 1 p.m. March 26.

Three University of Alabama students in the Culverhouse College of Commerce were recognized as ambassadors at the SAS Global Forum 2017 in April in Orlando, Florida. A fourth is a student scholarship winner. The SAS Student Ambassador program is a competition designed to recognize students using SAS software to benefit their respective fields of study. SAS provides business analytics software to corporations. In the competition, students submit a data project they completed; SAS judges select those for presentation at the conference. Students receive free travel and lodging at the conference. The ambassadors from UA are: Huan Li, Taylor Larkin and Caroline Bell. In addition, Alexandra DeKinder is a student scholarship winner. Their faculty mentor is Dr. Denise McManus, professor of management information systems and director of UA's Institute of Business Analytics.

UA's Global Health Case Competitionteam B received second place in a Birmingham competition in February. In Global Health Case Competitions, held across the country, teams of students receive a detailed description of a real-world public health challenge. They have about a week to prepare and present solutions to tackle that problem. This year's scenario was titled "Impact of Malnutrition in the First 1,000 Days on a Child's Health in Rural Ethiopia." Each team was asked to take on the identity of a nongovernmental organization working at the community level to address scarcity issues, promote healthy practices, and thus improve infant and early-childhood health.

The University of Alabama recently held the final round of its annual Three Minute Thesis competition, and a graduate student in the department of educational studies in psychology, research, methodology and counseling took home first place honors.