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Asian Business Case Competition

By October 5, 2016No Comments

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Deanna (second from the Right) at the ABCC in Singapore

Last month I was honored with the opportunity to represent my university at the Asian Business Case Competition. I was one of a team of four representing AUT, competing against 8 other universities. The other universities were from Canada, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands.

Asian Business Case Competition @ Nanyang is an international undergraduate business case competition in Singapore. It is organised by Nanyang Business School. Every year, the competition hosts undergraduate participants from business schools around the world, applying their knowledge and skills to solve real-life business problems.

The case was a forty hour case, done from our hotel rooms at Nanyang Technological University. After the forty hours, we presented in front of industry leaders for 15 minutes, followed by 15 minutes Q&A. The campus is quite large, and with many of it’s 32,000 students living on campus, we needed a bus just to get from one end to the other. I also enjoyed its family friendly atmosphere. Grandparents and children are welcomed, and there was a playground for every block of apartments. As a mum going to university, I really wish we had something like this here in New Zealand!

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Mosque in Arab Street

The days we had free from the competition, we were able to experience Singapore.

We went to little India, where we had the most amazing biryani. The tree top walk at Marina Bay Gardens was very relaxing. We went to Arab Street and went inside the incredible mosque they have there. For the last few days our hotel was a street away from the mosque, and we could hear the calls to prayer throughout the day.

Arab Street is truly very unique to a place like Singapore where there are very strict rules on street art. The walls of the street were covered with beautiful graffiti with the pavements full of trinkets and scarves from Arabia. As we walked down the cobbled streets, we saw people lounging on floor cushions blowing smokes from sheesha pipes. Finally we ended the day with a keg of tiger beer sitting in a quaint looking cafe looking onto peak hour traffic.

In Bugis we shopped for two days and still didn’t get to all the shops! We also went to a mall that was home to Prada and Chanel stores, complete with wooden boats to taxi you along the canal of water in the bottom level of the centre.

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Marina Bay Sands. The top of the hotel is made to look like a submarine.

We tried the local food, including durian( this fruit smells so bad its banned on the underground trains).

On the last evening we had dinner and cocktails on top of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. This rooftop bar and pool is a must see, but swimming on the edge of the 57th floor is rather terrifying. Singapore is beautiful, and has so much to experience. The heat took a couple of days to get used to, but I am certainly missing it now.

Although one of the teams from Canada took out the competition, it was an amazing trip and experience. I was fortunate to have such a great team, and to make friends with intelligent and driven people from all over the world. I will treasure these memories forever.

If you haven’t been to Singapore yet – make it your next destination!!

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