STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS

Saachi Bedi ’20 VSB P&Q

Julie Snitzer ’20 VSB

Poets & Quants chose 100 students from around the nation who use their skills to impact business in creative ways and who are poised to be the future leaders of the business world.

Two VSB Students Selected as Poets & Quants 2020 Best & Brightest Business Majors

Two Villanova School of Business students—Saachi Bedi ’20 VSB and Julie Snitzer ’20 VSB—were selected as Poets & Quants for Undergrads Best & Brightest Business Majors of 2020.

Saachi Bedi

From Princeton Junction, New Jersey, Bedi was a Finance major. She served as a research assistant for the Victoria and Justin Gmelich ’90 Lab for Financial Markets, events committee head and secretary for the Business and Leadership Society, and vice president of Philanthropy for the Alpha Phi Fraternity. Bedi is also a Gold Award recipient and lifetime member of the Girl Scouts. She has interned with Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. After graduation, Bedi returned to Goldman Sachs as an investment banking analyst.

Shelly Howton, PhD, chair of the Department of Finance & Real Estate, told Poets & Quants, “Saachi is a very strong advocate of promoting and supporting women in finance and has worked hard during her years in VSB to ensure she is a role model for future women Finance majors. She is a born leader who often leads by example.”

Julie Snitzer

Snitzer, of Arlington Heights, Illinois, was a Marketing major with a minor in Finance. She was actively involved on campus in a variety of roles, including serving as a VSB Ambassador, a local program host for Pennsylvania Special Olympics and a peer mentor for the Villanova Honors Program. She has also studied abroad in London, England, and in Cape Town, South Africa. She has interned with Grove Communication, Air Line Pilots Association and Newell Brands. She will begin working at Mercer as a career consulting analyst.

"Julie is an outstanding member of the Class of 2020,” said Cathy Toner, JD, assistant dean, Talent & Staff Development, Community and External Outreach. She continued, “I met Julie when she was a freshman, and she impressed me with her maturity, positive attitude and willingness to learn. One of the things I most appreciate about her is that she actively seeks opportunities to study and learn in different countries and cultures. Julie enhances the Villanova community with her presence and lives the Augustinian ideals of Veritas, Unitas and Caritas every day.”

Michael Badey ’22 VSB Jose Campos ’22 VSB Bryan Kent ’22 VSB Ian MacPherson ’20 VSB Colette Termaat Ryan DiLeva Aileen Manion ’22 VSB Sam Saferstein ’22 VSB Andrew Brown ’22 VSB

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS

’22 VSB Katherine Long Hayley Snyder ’22 VSB Ian Waggoner ’22 VSB Bridget Ryan ’20 CLAS

’22 VSB Padraig Loftus Sean Oates ’22 VSB Stephanie Frank ’23 VSB Steven Guachichullca ’22 VSB

’22 VSB ’22 VSB

Patrick Connors ’22 VSB

Michael Zuschlag ’22 VSB Matthew LaSorsa ’20 CLAS, ’21 VSB Sophie Matthews ’21 VSB Keegan Skinner ’22 VSB

VSB students are well-informed, highly motivated individuals who excel in the classroom and beyond. Students come from more than 40 states and more than 30 countries, bringing with them diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Read about their accomplishments on pages 6–7.

Bartley BriefCASE Challenge

Each academic year, VSB juniors team up to design solutions to real-life business problems in the bi-annual Bartley briefCASE Challenge. The case challenge is part of the Backpack to Briefcase professional development program, designed to holistically prepare students for success and leadership in business throughout their four-year VSB experience. The teams’ solutions are evaluated by judging panels comprised of VSB faculty and business executives.

In the fall 2019 semester, students studied the company Hot Chicken Takeover (HCT), a fast-casual Nashville-style fried chicken restaurant based in Columbus, Ohio. Teams were tasked with developing an expansion plan for the restaurant, including marketing campaigns, financing plans and long-term growth plans.

In the spring 2020 semester, teams studied Facebook, Inc. Students were tasked with advising the board on how to handle advertising on both quantitative and qualitative fronts while considering questions of privacy, regulation and ethical responsibility.

Bartley BriefCASE Winners

FALL 2019

Michael Badey Ryan DiLeva Aileen Manion Sam Saferstein SPRING 2020

Andrew Brown Jose Campos Katherine Long Hayley Snyder Ian Waggoner

Mulroy Real Estate Challenge

The DiLella Center hosted its 11th annual Mulroy Real Estate Challenge. This year, 28 teams from the top undergraduate real estate programs in the nation competed virtually on a development project case that incorporated all aspects from financing to design. The students presented to senior executives from top firms from all areas of the commercial real estate industry.

Fr. John Farrell

Fr. Farrell Undergraduate Research Award

Congratulations to Bridget Ryan ’20 CLAS, the inaugural winner of the Fr. Farrell Undergraduate Research Award. Ryan’s research studied the female labor force participation rate and international market volatility utilizing Stata, R and Bloomberg data. Named in honor of the late Fr. John Farrell, who taught economics at Villanova for two decades, and initiated by a donation from Scott Steel ’01 VSB, this award is dedicated to supporting undergraduate research projects in economics.

VSB Wins Elon Case Competition

From February 21–22, the Center for Business Analytics sponsored a team of VSB students to compete in the Champion® Analytics Case Competition (CACC) at Elon University. The case competition was hosted by the Elon Center for Organizational Analytics with HanesBrands. The case competition allows students the opportunity to build and demonstrate their data analytics creating a solution based

and visualization skills to professionals in the data analytics community.

There were 12 teams selected to attend from schools including Auburn University, Wake Forest University, and William & Mary. Teams were made up of graduate or undergraduate students in various fields, including data science, computer science, math, statistics, business and media analytics.

Teams were presented with Champion sales data and were tasked with projecting sales patterns and estimating project demand for 20 different products. David Anderson, assistant professor of Management & Operations, The VSB team: Bryan Kent ’22 VSB Padraig Loftus ’22 VSB Sean Oates ’22 VSB

The team was tasked with helped the team prepare for the case competition.

on a case in the apparel industry.

VSB Students Recognized in Blockchain Hackathon

VU hosted an “idea hackathon” from November 15–17, bringing together nine interdisciplinary teams of students from across the University’s schools and colleges to examine poverty as a global epidemic. Teams developed solutions for promoting economic growth by leveraging blockchain technology.

Ian MacPherson ’20 VSB and his team took second place. They used blockchain with a mobile app to track a government aid program and monitor cash flows to eliminate corruption and inefficiency. Their goal was to create transparent, quantifiable and sustainable policies to lift the economy and reduce poverty.

Stephanie Frank ’23 VSB and Steven Guachichullca ’22 VSB won honorable mention for creating a coin that placed a value on a meal prepared by a college dining service. Unused meals can be donated by students to a nonprofit that can then distribute the unused food to those in poverty using a blockchain transaction record system.

VSB Advances to National Finals in Deloitte Audit Innovation Campus Challenge

Last fall, a team of VSB Accounting majors traveled to compete in the annual Deloitte Audit Innovation Campus Challenge. The challenge awards students for ideas that revolutionize the audit, and the mission statement for 2020 was to incorporate artificial intelligence into the assurance process in some new way. The team from Villanova included Patrick Connors ’22 VSB; Matthew LaSorsa ’20 CLAS, ’21 VSB; Sophie Matthews ’21 VSB; Keegan Skinner ’22 VSB; Colette Termaat ’22 VSB; and Michael Zuschlag ’22 VSB. The team was accompanied by local Deloitte Philadelphia partner Scott King ’92 VSB and faculty advisor Associate Professor Patricia Dorris-Crenny ’82 VSB.

The team was preparing to compete in April against the other regional finalists at Deloitte University in Texas for the national finals when the competition was canceled due to the COVID-19 crisis. Deloitte presented all the members of the regional finalist teams and their universities with cash awards.