Undergraduates Cecilia De La Cruz and Jing Li flew to Columbus, Ohio, to attend the 2013 KeyBank and Fisher College of Business Leadership and Creativity Undergraduate Minority Student Symposium this October.

Hosted at the campus of The Ohio State University, the event brought together forty-five business and engineering students from twenty-eight United States universities for three days of intensive skill-building workshops in leadership training, creativity, product innovation, persuasive communication, and more.

A team-based case competition was the highlight of the jam-packed weekend. Thanks to her Lundquist College coursework, De La Cruz felt well prepared to take on the challenge.

"I had actually done a similar case from the Harvard Business Review in class, so I felt like I had something to bring to the table," De La Cruz recalled.

Calling on a technique she had recently learned in a management course, De La Cruz suggested that the team members read the case on their own before working on it as a group.

“The next day we came back together and started brainstorming, and that's when we came up with our idea," she said.

The idea they came up with won the team first place in the competition.

Already, the undergraduates are poised to embark on their next adventures.

Li—a double major in accounting and economics who was one of only three international students at the symposium—has begun a highly competitive, six-month stint as a finance intern at Amazon in Seattle, Washington. This January, business major De La Cruz heads to the southern hemisphere to spend winter term studying abroad in Brazil.