Business student earns first prize at international meeting in California

Taylor Fletcher, a senior Business student at Youngstown State University, was part of a team that won the Project Run With It competition at the international Beta Alpha Psi annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif.

Fletcher, a double major in Accounting and International Business, is a member of Beta Alpha Psi, an honor organization for financial and business information college students. She is also a member of the Honors College.

Project Run With It provides Beta Alpha Psi members and candidates with an opportunity to engage in a real-world consulting project. Seventy-two Beta Alpha Psi student representatives from chapters all over the world worked together in teams during the annual conference to develop solutions to real-life business problems of actual not-for-profit organizations.

The case assigned to Fletcher’s group was the Environmental Nature Center in Newport Beach, Calif. The ENC is building a nature preschool and asked Beta Alpha Psi to help develop some financial models to configure preschool sessions to assure a self-sustaining program that engages parents and the community as well as address the philanthropic goals of the center.

“The biggest part about this project was trusting my three teammates to put forth the effort in performing research and putting together their estimates, as well as practicing for the final presentation,” Fletcher said. “Together, we all created a five-year sustainability timeline for the preschool to ensure the longevity of the program. I put my trust in my teammates, and it proved to be successful because we won.”