On April 19 and 20, CMU’s Society for Human Resource Management club (SHRM) beat CU Boulder’s team in the SHRM Southwest Central Regional Student Conference in Austin, Texas. The team comprised of Chelsea Knoll, Laura Allen and Luke Jackson, along with their advisor, Dr. Schutz, all competed against seven states and took sixth out of fifteen in the Human Resource competition.

Knoll, Allen and Jackson, all Human Resource majors, teamed up after never working together in a competition setting before and in an event that none of them had experienced.

“The fact that the three of us all have very different personalities and we all like to take charge, I think that is what we dealt with best,” Allen said jokingly, “being able to decide when to let go of the power because that is a struggle for me on a daily basis.”

The competition is where the competitors are all given a Human Resource case that they have to solve within four hours and then present to the judges as if the judges were their clients. Both the cases for the graduate and the undergraduate competitors were mixed together and mislabeled. By the time the team realized they were working on the wrong case, they only had three hours to complete the case and presentation.

“I was ecstatic because it was the first time that we had ever done this,” Allen said. “I didn’t expect this, especially since there were such big-named schools there. And everyone put off such a great air of confidence that they had done this before and they were very comfortable. It kind of intimidated me at first. Knowing that we beat those big name schools really boosted my confidence in the knowledge that I have.”

The team was eager to meet and network with other Human Resource majors from other schools and Human Resource professionals.

“WCHRA- Western Colorado Human Resource Association is a sponsoring organization for us,” Schutz said. “Our students have numerous opportunities to meet with professionals in the WCHRA Organization, and that is awesome.”

The students gave credit to their professors, who helped them prepare in class for these projects. They stated that the in class projects for Schutz’s class really helped them excel in the competition and give the judges more than what they asked for. The strategies they learned in class helped them really make their points and solidify their case.

“Some of the key projects that Dr. Shutz, our advisor or professor, has us do in class and some of the projects that our strategies and our finances professor, had prepared us to meet the qualifications, to be able to crank out a case strategy in three hours,” Knoll said. “I was really proud of my team for given the situation, just being able to represent CMU business department, CMU on that level and scale.”

ebloom@mavs.coloradomesa.edu