ChickSpeak

What happens when you take two teams of brilliant and driven college students from Towson University’s Business School, create your own version of Trump’s “Apprentice,” and bring in ChickSpeak’s leaders to deliver that week’s challenge? Check out the article in full from The Towerlight to find out!

Synergy wins again; nobody fired

Team Da Vinci falls for second consecutive week, keeps all members

Andrew Fortier

News | 3/13/08

The Associate competition ended this week with Team Synergy winning their second case study, but in an unexpected twist, no member from the losing Team Da Vinci was fired.

“All the team members did an excellent job,” CEO of St. Joseph Medical Center John Tolmie said. “We didn’t feel any one individual fell short of the objective and that at this point in the competition to have someone leave would not have been fair, and would not have been reflective of all of the hard work put into it so far.”

The Associate is an annual competition held by the College of Business and Economics. The contest is modeled after the NBC reality show “The Apprentice,” where students in the CBE compete for a job given by that year’s “Donald Trump,” typically an executive from a company in Baltimore. This year’s Trump is Tolmie.

Chickspeak.com, a social networking Web site aimed toward young women, provided this week’s case study that challenged the teams to develop a business plan and devise a plan to make the site a “tool for daily living.”

“I think it’s clear that this competition prepares the business students for the real world,” founder of Chickspeak.com and president of TaraFinn Productions LLC Christina Twomey said.

“I was blown away by each team, and the decision was so challenging.”

Amanda Gutin led Team Synergy who prefaced their case with the question, “What do women want?” Synergy’s presentation focused on new features for the Web site including widgets, Google search engine capabilities, and a “Dream to Inspire” essay contest for members of the site.

Read the rest of the story here.