A team of five Dartmouth undergraduate and graduate students created a hypothetical plan to efficiently allocate resources for 800,000 refugees in East Africa as part of Emory University's Global Health Case Competition, which concluded March 19. The students Vaidehi Mujumdar '13, Saryah Azmat '11, Cameron Nutt '11, Allison Arensman Tu'11 and Maija Cheung DMS'13 won an honorable mention prize and $1,000 for their proposal.
The competition allowed teams of four to six students to engage in "real-life case scenarios" by proposing strategic recommendations regarding issues ranging from health care to cultural understanding and international law, according to the competition's website.
The competition attracted over 120 students from 13 universities. Two teams from Emory earned first and second prize, while Dartmouth and the University of California, San Francisco earned honorable mentions.
Participating teams received electronic copies of the case scenario on March 14. Team members had until March 19 to formulate a proposal without any outside help and present their plan to a panel of judges, according to the competition's website.
The case required students to provide recommendations to an imaginary director of programming for the East Africa regional office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sofi Kannan. Under the hypothetical scenario, Kannan had to generate a "strategic operational plan" for the UNHCR in the midst of a 50 percent budget reduction, according to the competition's website.
Cheung said the experience was challenging for every group member.
"It was a lot of work," Cheung said. "The case was on a topic that none of us really had experience on so we had to do a lot of background research looking at programs that had worked in the past and programs that had failed."
Dartmouth's team initially presented its proposal the morning of March 19 in front of several judges, according to Azmat. After the group was named one of the four finalists, team members delivered a final presentation that afternoon to a new set of judges.
The Dartmouth team's proposal focused on the technological and epidemiological aspects of the case, while the winning teams focused more on the business aspects, according to Azmat.
"Our case was really innovative, really creative and really technologically advanced," she said.
The group prepared for the competition by speaking with faculty members including Tuck School of Business professor Donald Conway and Jaime Bayona, director of Global Health Programs and Practice for the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science regarding ways to solve a general case, according to Presidential Fellow Molly Bode '09, who worked with the team. The team also contacted alumni working in the field of global health, Bode said.
Team members interviewed by The Dartmouth praised the competition for bringing together multiple disciplines to address a single problem.
Arensman said she enjoyed the opportunity to work through a case that drew from recent events with other students.
"It was a neat opportunity to take a multidisciplinary problem and approach it with multidisciplinary solutions," she said.
The competition helps prepare students planning to pursue careers in global health by exposing them to situations like the ones they may encounter in future job positions, according to Dartmouth Medical School professor Lisa Adams, who serves as the Infectious Disease and International Health coordinator at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and worked with the team.
"These competitions provide a low-risk opportunity for working under an intense pressure on a complex problem in global health," Adams said in an email to The Dartmouth.
The selection process for the team members was competitive and involved both an application and an interview, which were evaluated by a team of Dartmouth faculty, including Bode, Adams, Bayona and Dartmouth Global Health Initiative Program Coordinator Jessica Friedman.
"We chose a group of students who had different backgrounds and as a whole could tackle any problem," she said.
