BU Team Places Second in International Case-Study Competition.
Three MPH/MBA candidates were part of a Boston University team that took second place at the Emory Global Health Case Competition, a rigorous case-study challenge featuring 23 universities from around the world.
Nearly as impressive as the official result was the peer recognition from other competitors, who voted the multidisciplinary BU squad the “Audience Choice Award” for its presentation. It was the first time BU sent a team to the event.
Team members were: MPH/MBA candidates Ivan Busulwa, Catherine Shih, and Meg Meyer; medical student Daniel Silva; MD/MBA student Sunil Nair; and biomedical engineering student Darash Desai.
Rich Feeley, assistant chair and professor of international health, helped organize the team and was thrilled by the result.
“This is the first time we’ve sent a team and this is the first time Emory opened the competition to this many schools,” Feeley said. “It’s vindication that we run a good program.”
First place went to an experienced Emory team that won a similar intramural competition in mid February.
As in the past four years of the event, the problem presented to students was an extremely difficult public health and development issue. This year’s question threw in a political twist for an added degree of difficulty.
The question: “Develop a strategy for Canadian aid to Sri Lanka that deals with the health and resettlement issues of the Tamil population, keeping in mind the resistance of the Sinhalese government to accusations of war crimes and persecution, and recognizing the presence of a great many Tamil refugees in Canada.”
Said Feeley, “I read that and thought, ‘Man, I’m glad I don’t have to do that one.'”
Team Captain Ivan Busulwa said the team met informally about three weeks before the competition just to get to know each other, but the real preparation took place in a few hectic, sleep-deprived days.
“We received the case on Monday, March 26th at 7pm and had four days to prepare for the competition since it was going to be held on the morning of Saturday, March 31st, ” Busulwa said.
Event preparation had to be squeezed around their already packed schedules. “Coordinating six people from four different schools is a challenge, so we had to meet from 9 pm to 11 pm that week,” Shih said.
Meyer said those brainstorming sessions were effective and helped develop their plan of thinking. “In the end we were surprised that our final ideas ended up being similar to the ones we had initially come up with.”
The team left for Atlanta on Thursday evening and set to work at fine-tuning the presentation. The Friday before the event was extremely stressful, Busulwa said. “We worked on the case for virtually 18 hours then had two hours of sleep before regrouping on Saturday morning for a final run.”
The students said they used the Policy Maker framework from the Global Pharmaceutical Policy Issues (IH820) class to analyze stakeholders. Planning and Managing Maternal and Child Health Programs in Developing Countries (IH887) and Social and Behavioral Sciences classes (IH720) were useful in helping them come up with key indicators. They said they also gained a competitive edge from the presentation skills and case study experience from the MBA portion of their dual degree program.
In addition to BU and Emory, participating schools included Claremont Graduate University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, ITAM (Mexico), McGill University (Canada), Northwestern, Oxford University (England), Princeton University, Tulane, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of California at San Francisco, University of Chicago, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), University of Miami, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Virginia, Vanderbilt University, Yale University, and Yeshiva University.