Graduate students from across the nation competed Jan. 13 to 15 at the 35th annual MBA Games, the largest MBA competition in Canada, with York University's Team Schulich taking first place in the Academic category.
This event, hosted in-person by York's Schulich School of Business, was a three-day competition featuring 14 teams representing leading business schools from across the country competing in Academic, Athletic and Spirit challenges for the coveted Queen’s Cup.
Under the strong leadership of Meenakshi Kukreja (MBA ’23), Team Schulich performed consistently across all categories. The theme for this year’s event was “Reimagine: It Starts with Us.”
Team Schulich finished in third place overall, with a first-place award in Academics and third-place in Spirit.
“Meenakshi and the whole team did an outstanding job,” said Team coach and Adjunct Marketing Professor Joe Fayt. “They are ideal Schulich ambassadors. They worked together with a strong sense of collaboration and mutual respect, and extended the same generosity of spirit to all competitors and organizers.”
The team had a very strong performance in the Academics case competition, where it dominated the category with Schulich finishing in first place in both cases. The first case, which was sponsored by Bruce Power, challenged students to envision the future of electric cars in Ontario and make recommendations on how to build out the infrastructure for power generation and distribution, and for electric vehicle charging. The other case was sponsored by Simplii Financial, a division of CIBC, and asked students to develop a strategy to increase market penetration among international students and newcomers to Canada.
The team also delivered an exciting performance during the opening ceremonies. The students demonstrated their unstoppable drive and enthusiasm in a beautifully choreographed and high-energy dance performance.
“Team Schulich represented a reimagined world by showing unity and putting their best foot forward. I am so proud of what we achieved together,” said Kukreja.
With this third-place standing, Schulich has placed in the top three in 20 of the past 21 games. The team is already preparing for next year’s competition.