Competing against eight other university teams, the UCR School of Business team earned second place during their inaugural appearance at the 29th Annual Information Technology Competition. The contest was hosted by the Management Information Systems Student Association at Cal Poly Pomona on April 26.

“Teams chose a category to compete in, and ours was data analytics,” says Gina Gardea, co-vice president of the UCR Association for Information Systems student organization, which supported and sent the team. 

Three weeks before the competition, the UCR team received the IT-related case study they were to explore. The UCR competitors created a proposal and slideshow and posed as “consultants” presenting to the six judges as “shareholders” at the in-person competition.   

The team combined their respective talents in data cleaning and visualization using Python along with dashboard creation on Power BI. “Using these skills to compete in a near real-world scenario was a really comprehensive learning experience,” says Gardea. “Our team’s thinking processes, presentation methods, and knowledge from business classes helped make us competitive.” 

UCR’s winning team—Javier Becerril ’25, Ananya Pandit ’28, Muhammad Sabeel ’26, Sanvi Srinivas ’27, and Wafa Suhir ’28—are all members of the UCR Association for Information Systems Association and regularly improve their technical and business skills with quarterly association workshops. “The competition was a perfect opportunity to polish these skills,” adds Gardea, and the victory was particularly celebratory as first-time participants in the annual contest. 

“We competed against schools such as UC Irvine and Cal State Long Beach, and they had participated before,” says Gardea. “As newcomers, we managed to place second and receive personal congratulations from the judges.” 

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Header image (from left to right): Javier Becerril ’25, Ananya Pandit ’28, Muhammad Sabeel ’26, Sanvi Srinivas ’27, and Wafa Suhir ’28