Students from the SMEAL College of Business took the stage of the Penn Stater Conference Center at the event The Next CEO on Thursday night -- but only one walked away with a two thousand dollar scholarship.
Matthew Shannon (sophomore-finance) was named The Next CEO and was awarded with the scholarship. John Cremo (senior-marketing) came in second place, winning a Mac Book and Kenneth Chan (junior-international business) won third place and a gift card to Dick's Sporting Goods.
Shannon represented DuPoint, Cremo represented Genyme Corporation and Chan represented Hewlett-Packard.
Out of 100 students who applied to compete, only ten students were chosen. The ten students were given a particular business to represent. Prior to the competition, the candidates went to Washington, D.C., where they studied their businesses.
The hosts of the event were two Penn State alumni who first created the competition: Atif Ghauri, senior manager of security for Comcast, and Ryan Newman, the vice president of Goldman Sachs.
"The students are exposed to global issues. The event is very enriching," said Andrew Bergstein, Penn State's associate director for the center for sports business and research.
During the first round, the candidates had two minutes to tell the judges what they would do in a particular scenario and had one minute to answer a question from the judges. One of the scenarios involved the candidates stating actions they would take if the password of their company was leaked to an unknown source.
While the candidates were working on the first round, the audience of 200 students, staff and business executives watched a presentation titled "seven revolutions" about global trends that will affect the world and international business in the next 20 years.
After the first round, five of the candidates were eliminated.
The remaining five candidates were then given another scenario and one minute to explain the actions they would take and
30 seconds to answer a question from the judges. Following the second round, two more candidates were eliminated leaving the final three candidates.
