In May 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, lockdowns and restrictions, Ansaar Ali took on international competitors from universities across the globe and made his way to 2nd place in the 2020 Capstone Business Simulation Spring (Capsim) Challenge.
As part of the course Advanced Strategic Management Simulation (part of the Management Studies programme within the Faculty of Social Sciences), students can choose to take on the Challenge, where they test some of the business skills they have acquired against their peers in a eight-round tournament. Although three students from The UWI completed the first round in the top ten, the rules only allow one student per university to move forward. The two students who also performed highly in the first round were Simon Supersad, who placed sixth and Alfayad Ali, who placed tenth.
Ansaar went on to represent UWI all the way to the finals, competing against students from countries such as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Jamaica, Poland, Thailand, Turkey and the United States. Impressively, he did so while dealing with a limitation that the other finalists did not have:
“The rest of the competitors in the final were actually groups. I was the only solo competitor,” he says. But even though he had no formal team on his side, he had the support of his teachers, Lecturer in Information Systems, E-commerce and Business Strategy Simon Fraser, and Christopher Marshall a UWI graduate and tutor with the Management Studies Department. Marshall placed in the top ten in a previous Capsim Challenge. Ansaar was also supported by his colleagues Alfayad, Amirah John and Kimberly Sookdeo.
Fraser, who first introduced the course to UWI almost 10 years ago, says that it teaches students in a more hands-on way. “It’s unlike any other class they’ve done, because there are no lectures.”
For Ansaar, this was a part of the appeal— practicing skills they had learned in an engaging format. “This course wasn’t about learning new things, but about implementing what we had learned in a practical way,” he says. And although the word “success” in business often makes people think of profits, the process of winning a simulation deals with all areas of business, not just the money.
“You’re not just being graded on how you perform profit-wise. You are being graded on a lot of different areas of a company that we do not always consider here in Trinidad. The first thing that comes to mind when we think of companies is who makes the most profit, but this simulation offers beyond that—for example, if there is a high employee turnover rate, that means the company is not doing well in terms of how you are treating your employees,” says Ansaar.
The Capsim Challenge is open to students across the globe who have used a Capsim simulation in the previous 12 months, and gives young minds an opportunity to test their business acumen in realistic conditions while competing against the rest of the world.
The competition is fierce, but Fraser says there is one thing that students such as Ansaar and others from the Management Studies programme need to remember:
“Be brave.”
