A team led by Adam White, a junior majoring in finance at the University of Pittsburgh College of Business Administration, placed first overall at the 2018 Keybank Leadership and Creativity Undergraduate Minority Student Symposium at The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business.
Held over three days in November, the event featured a case competition and lectures by faculty on financial modeling, spreadsheet analysis, negotiations, and leadership. The case competition, which split 45 undergraduate students from across the country into teams, asked students to assess the culture of KeyBank and to explore opportunities for fostering innovation companywide. Using Apple as a benchmark, the teams conducted a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of KeyBank’s organizational culture and made recommendations — backed by a profit and loss statement — on innovative practices for implementation.
“Our solution was related to what KeyBank already has in place so we encouraged them to leverage their strengths to innovate further,” White says.
One recommendation by his team was to have KeyBank partner with a financial technology company as a way to signal its innovation prowess to customers and the industry.
Considered one of the nation’s top undergraduate case competitions, the KeyBank and Ohio State event is for underrepresented student groups and minority students.
White was also awarded the first place prize by the judges in the Q&A category, giving him one of the competition’s top individual honors.
Exciting as it was to place first in the case competition, White says his favorite part of the whole experience were the friendships he made with his teammates and other competition participants.
The case competition puts students from different business schools together on teams. White’s group included students from the University of Tennessee, South Carolina State University, Claflin University, and Central State University.
White received a referral to participate in the competition from Pitt Business alumni Evan Turman and Everett Green, who placed in the competition when they were students.
The case competition win bolsters the resume of White, who plans to work in investment banking post-graduation. He has secured an internship with Bank of America in New York City this summer. He is currently an investment intern at the University of Pittsburgh Office of Finance.
White is the president of Alpha Kappa Psi, is a member of the Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Portfolio, and is a member of the Roberto Clemente Minority Business Association (RCMBA).
“The entire Pitt Business community is proud of Adam for his accomplishment of leading the winning team and placing first in the Q&A session of the KeyBank and Ohio State University case competition,” says Audrey J. Murrell, associate dean of Pitt Business and director of the David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership.
“Adam demonstrated that, when performing on the big stage, our students are top performers in their fields. He is a shining example of the power of our mission of taking students From the Classroom, To the City, To the World,” Murrell says.
Learn More
- Learn more about the more than two dozen student organizations at Pitt Business, which help prepare students for case competition victories.
- Learn more about the finance major at Pitt Business, which benefits from the school’s status as a CFA Program Partner of the CFA Institute.
- Watch the Pitt Business internship video to see how internships are part of the student experience at Pitt Business.
