What was the best thing about the competition?
The best thing about International Case Competition at Maastricht was getting the opportunity to put the knowledge I gained throughout my degree into practice, solving real-life business problems. Although the business cases were in industries I didn't necessarily have experience in, the core of the problem always related to a topic I extensively studied at Aston.
I've learnt that the best way to succeed in cracking a case study is to not underestimate the importance of breaking it down into sections, and extracting the crucial information that will help you in actually answering the questions being asked. It's easy to get lost in the extra information used to 'inflate' the case.
What would be your advice to the next team?
If I could provide a piece of advice, (or maybe two), I would firstly say reviewing previous cases allows you to understand the high level of presentations and detail that is put into these cases. My second piece of advice would be to get as much experience as you can. With this being my first international business case, I understood this would be a learning curve and that relived some the pressure off me. Embracing this mindset, allowed our team to obtain insights from each presented business case and communicate with other teams, enabling us to learn various strategies and gain advice from other teams and case competitions as a whole.