Tobin Students Excel in Virtual Business Competitions

Two Peter J. Tobin College of Business students achieved first-place honors in the 2017 X-Culture global virtual team project based at the Bryan School of Business and Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

John Damoulis, a student in Professor of Management Charles Wankel’s 2017 online section of Global Business Strategy, was assigned to a team of students from other nations that managed to come out first of 887 teams in the Competition, which defines itself as “a large-scale experiential learning exercise designed to provide students with an opportunity to gain first-hand experience in international virtual collaboration.” Another of Wankel’s students, Kavya Desari ‘17TCB, was on the international team that was recognized as the winner among all of the reports written on UniCheck, a Kiev, Ukraine-based maker of plagiarism detection software. Her team become one of the eight best teams in the competition.

Damoulis was the only American on his five-member team, which included students from France, Portugal and India. Working virtually, the team developed a detailed business plan for Unicheck to expand into China. The resulting 28-page report was read and evaluated by a team of international experts, which ultimately awarded the team its top ranking.

Damoulis believes that the experience not only enhanced his education at Tobin, but his career prospects as well, for numerous reasons.

Noting that he had to collaborate with people in different time zones, and at all hours, the Bronx native and graduate of Salesian High School in New Rochelle, N.Y. said that the competition “teaches you that if you work with people around the world, you can work with people in your own country.” 

A Presidential Gold Medalist in 2017, Dasari, who will receive her MBA from Tobin next month, hopes to attain her CFA certification eventually. Her X-Culture experience also reinforced her desire to start an e-commerce business.

“A key thing I learned was that there weren’t any major differences between my team members and I, despite us all living in different areas of the world,” she said. “Perhaps it was because we were all majoring in business that our mindsets were very similar. In addition, I also feel that I had become more worldly and have become a more effective communicator as well.”

Desari was also a member of a team that was one of the finalists in AIM2Flourish, an initiative of the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), of which The Peter J. Tobin College of Business is a Champion Institution. PRME supports the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which were established in 2015.

For this service learning assignment, Desari’s team produced a report, Investing in a Brighter Future, for Lumni, a Chile-based provider of student microloans.

“This is action learning,” Wankel said of his students. “It enables them to jump into the world and to work with people who will be part of their networks for the rest of their lives.”