QUEST Team Wins Deloitte Case Competition

Four students in the QUEST Honors Program at the University of Maryland won the $4,000 grand prize in the annual Deloitte Consulting Undergraduate National Case Study Competition on March 11, 2017.

Qualifying teams from all over the nation took an all-expense paid trip to Deloitte University in Westlake, Texas, and competed head to head for the grand prize. Each team developed and presented a business strategy to a panel of Deloitte executives.

The winning team included sophomore Alex Tran at the Robert H. Smith School of Business and three QUEST classmates from the A. James Clark School of Engineering. Those students included sophomores Conor Casey, Brooke Nesselt and Josh Cocker.

The teammates have been friends since high school and decided to form an alliance for the competition. In their first attempt in 2016, they won at the university level but fell short in Texas. So they decided to enter the competition again this year.  

“In QUEST we do a lot of presentations, so we were not scared to present in front of the large audience,” Tran said.

QUEST, the Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams Honors Program, is a multidisciplinary, hands-on program for qualifying UMD undergraduate students. The program is comprised of students from the Smith School, the Clark School and the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences.

The friends will continue to work together at QUEST, which emphasizes collaboration and reality-based learning.

— Mamayaa Opoku, Smith School communications writer