Marketing Summit 2010: Representing the Home Team

Aiming as we have all week long to give everyone a complete advance look at the Wake Forest University team for this year's Marketing Summit, here is the firsthand experience of Andy Rinehart.

Continue to look for more updates over this weekend's events and activities as the official website gears up for its debut!

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As one of two first-year MBA students on the team representing the Wake Forest University Graduate Schools of Business at this year’s Marketing Summit, I don’t possess the same level of academic experience as my second-year teammates. That’s one of the main reasons I applied for the team in the first place: the opportunity to compete and learn in a challenging, exciting environment.

Despite a lack of marketing experience, my military background means that I can still be a useful, productive contributor on the team. In particular, I think my biggest strength in the competition will be my ability to handle ambiguous, uncertain situations. Dealing with uncertainty is something that all officers are trained to do in the U.S. Army, because no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Nobody on the team knows what problem IBM will throw at us, and that’s just fine by me.

The selection process involved a written application and an interview with the four second-year MBA students on the team. The interview revolved around a discussion and analysis of contemporary issues in marketing, and the hour seemed to pass by quickly. When I received an email the next week letting me know I had been selected, I was pretty psyched.
I was an all-season athlete in high school, and I really get fired up at the prospect of testing my skills and preparation in competition. As a team, we’ve worked on practice cases and done plenty of research to get ourselves ready for crunch time. It is a tremendous honor to represent Wake Forest as the “home team,” and we are eager to show the judges what we can do.