Dubai: Students from the University of Wollongong in Dubai (UOWD) won the 2010 UAE final Global Business Challenge (GBC) recently. The four UOWD students, of the Bizz Wizards team, beat four other teams to the top. The team will travel to Malaysia in August to compete against the best teams from the rest of the world, offering them international exposure. The runners-up in the event were Trident, the only male team of four students from Heriot Watt University Dubai.
Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) organised the event, which was sponsored by Barclays Capital. The audience got to see how managing accountants are involved in business planning and advising. The global president of CIMA, Aubrey Joachim, who hosted the event, is the first non-UK president in 90 years of CIMA's establishment. "CIMA has always been pushing business leadership," Joachim said and added "therefore we were interested in getting young people to come up and identify themselves as future business leaders".
The students' perspective
One of the members of the first team to start the event, Nandita Ramanathan, said she participated in the event because she believed it would be a good idea to put her finance and accounting skills in an actual business situation. Pursuing an accounting degree from Phoenix Financial Training, she said "while pursuing a professional degree, it's very difficult to take part in activities that usually university students take part in, because we don't have that sort of opportunity and this is the closest we could get to a university experience".
Another accounting major, Samia Afroz Iftekhar, who recently graduated from Abu Dhabi University, felt that this event was a good opportunity to see how consultants actually work. "It also helps me decide whether I want to pursue professional degrees in accounting or not," said the Bangladeshi team member of Corporate Climbers.
The Freshman Group from the American University of Sharjah was the only team that showed a diversity of students studying in different majors. Hossam Shoman, a student double-majoring in electrical engineering and mathematics, said he participated in the event because he wants to broaden his views in different fields.