4 Students Win Case for a Cause Competition

Four Wesleyan sophomores won consulting company Roland Berger’s annual Case for a Cause competition on Friday, April 9.

The competition, which raises money for the Make-A-Wish-Foundation, gives students a space to apply their practical skills and simulate strategy consulting work.

Asa Sakornpant ’23, Natchanok (Pim) Wandee ’23, Sarah Rizky Ardhani ’23, and Ransho Ueno ’23 belong to the Consulting Pathways Club and are all pursuing the data analysis minor through Wesleyan’s Quantitative Analysis Center.

Sakornpant, Ardhani, and Ueno are Freeman Asian Scholars and were sponsored by the Gordon Career Center to take part in the competition.

Wesleyan last won in 2018, when its team tied for first place, and made it to the finals in both 2019 and 2020. Though the competition looked different this year because of the virtual environment, Wesleyan once again took home first place. The team members’ prize is a guaranteed first-round interview with Roland Berger, which has 52 offices in 35 countries.

“At some point in my freshman year, I got interested in business consulting as my future career, and I was close to Sarah, and so we decided to do this competition,” Ueno told Associate Director of the Quantitative Analysis Center Professor Pavel Oleinikov in a recent interview with the winners. “And I’ve really benefited a lot from my teammates because I have never done [a] Case competition before, so I did not know how to approach it. But, I really liked QAC classes, since freshman year, and the skills that I might be able to gain from QAC classes—I was able to apply them in the competition.”

The students agree that being able to work well together greatly contributed to their success in the competition.

“I think finding a good team is really important, not just in terms of whether it’s flat or hierarchical, but as in, ‘be with the people that you like to spend time with,’” Sakornpant said. “I think that’s the most important, even before looking into what each person’s expertise is. . . . The way we approached it was, we like switching around what each one does because we are holistic. But I don’t think it is because of our expertise, but rather because we chose a team in which we knew we could communicate together.”

The team spent a lot of time prepping for the competition, including staying up late many nights. Each member emphasized that they got a lot out of the competition experience.

“I came into Wesleyan not really knowing what I wanted to do, but then I got acquainted with a lot of people who are trying to go into consulting or the finance industry, and I think these are two main areas that I will be looking into in the future,” Ardhani said. “And joining the Case competition made me think that consulting is actually pretty fun. We had to stay up pretty late at night, but we were trying to solve problems as a team. I am still pretty open about my future, but the Case competition made me realize that this is pretty cool.”

For Wandee, the competition was about more than just walking away with a prize.

“I wasn’t going into the competition to win,” Wandee said. “It was more like, ‘Okay, we want to do our best and give it all.’ And it doesn’t even matter what other people do because we did not get to see our competitors present at all. So it was just us and the judges and our main focus was ‘just do our best.’”