Fall 2014 New Student Orientation

The Fall 2014 New Student Orientation was a great success! This year’s orientation is not a one, but a two-day event, starting early Friday morning and going through Saturday afternoon. After a warm welcome from Dean Mikhail and Assistant Dean Mary Clark, students rolled up their sleeves and got down to business.

With four Professional Presence sessions, led by Michael Popowits, Richard Thomas, and Ranjit Souri, students had the opportunity to acquaint themselves with professional presence in a whole new way. Students exercised different ways of making contact and connecting with each other through sharing personal and professional aspirations.

In between Professional Presence sessions, students also met their respective graduate program director, as well as participated in professional development sessions conducted by the staff of Liautaud’s ever-growing Business Career Center.

During the first day of orientation, many students were exposed to business cases for the first time. Leading this introduction to the infamous business case was none other than Professor Mark Shanley. Professor Shanley helped to take the bite out of the business case through his “How to Crack a Case” workshop. With the help of the Professional Presence sessions and the “How to Crack a Case” workshop students were ready to crack their first case of business school, provided by Ernst & Young.

After breaking off into teams, students worked to crack their case and develop a strategy to present their efforts to a panel of judges, consisting of honorable UIC Liautaud alumni and Ernst & Young representatives, on Saturday. After a day of presenting and learning more about student life at UIC Liautaud, students waited patiently as the winners of the case competition were announced.

The winning teams included:

Team Purple Line – Christopher Swan, Seshadri Karthick, Hanharan Karur Subramanian, Peter Jimenez, Jason Garcia

Team McCormick Place – Ambika Garg, Subramaniam Palghat Balasubramanian

Team Millennium Park – Angela Chinino, Kevan Citta, Sai Dheeraj Illendula, Vignesh Ramakrishnan, Sigma Satabdhi, Sade Stokes

Team Midway Airport – Kumaran Anbalagan, Deesha Kulkarni, Nicholas Marsteller, Joyce Omoigui, Shrenik Sheth

Team O’Hare Airport – Anki Agrawal, Kyle Hempel, Hrishikesh Kotwal, Amanda Long, Pravesh Halady Shenoy

Team Magnificent Mile – Teresa Blahnik, Siddhartha Gadiraju, Natalie Payer, Yuechen Wang

Team Water Tower – Nisanth Ayyagari, Sri Manikanth Duggirala, Karthikeyan Venugopal

Team Orange Line – Michael Hart, Neelanshu Kothari, Sarthik Shan, Xu Zhifu

Promptly following the announcement of the winning teams, everyone headed over to Jak’s Tap, a popular meeting place for Liautaud students, thus completing the inauguration of the Fall 2014 incoming class.

We are excited to have everyone on campus and impressed with what we’ve seen so far, you are an amazing class with great potential!