Listen in as Alexis and a group of public health students discuss their experiences with student case competitions and the associated educational benefits such as networking opportunities and professional development. She’s joined this week by Kaleb Brooks, Sophie Dollison, Kori Thomas, and Mekenna Ollinger.

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Alexis Clark:

Hello everyone, welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Alexis Clark, and if this is your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone both in and out of the field of public health. I am joined today by four students from the College of Public Health here at Iowa and we’ll be chatting about their experiences competing in case competitions while completing their graduate programs. Today’s guests are Kaleb Brooks, Kori Thomas, Sophie Dollison, and Mekenna Ollinger. Before we get started, it would be great for the listeners to get a sense of who each of you are. So if you would like to introduce yourselves. Kaleb, do you want to start us off?

Kaleb Brooks:

Yeah. I’m Kaleb Brooks. I’m from Ankeny, Iowa, and I got my undergrad here at Iowa, BS in public health, and I am a second-year MPH student in epidemiology.

Kori Thomas:

Hi, I’m Kori Thomas. I’m a second-year MHA student. I’m from Washington, DC. I did my undergraduate degree as well at Iowa with a focus in health and human physiology and global health studies.

Sophie Dollison:

My name is Sophie Dollison. I am from Ankeny, Iowa, as well, and I did my undergrad at the University of Iowa. I did a bachelor of science degree in public health, and then I did the undergrad to grad program, and now I’m a second-year MPH student in the Community and Behavioral Health Department.

Mekenna Ollinger:

Hi everyone, my name’s Mekenna Ollinger and I am originally from Davenport, Iowa. I received my undergrad degree here at the University of Iowa in 2020 with a BS in health and human physiology, therapeutic recreation with the minor in psychology. I am currently a first-year Master’s of Health Administration student in the Department of Health Management and Policy.

Alexis Clark:

So all four of you went to Iowa for your undergrad. Is that right? That’s wild. And then I guess I didn’t realize that, but that’s kind of neat. So Sophie, can you give us a brief description of what case competitions are and what the format looks like for you?

Sophie Dollison:

Yeah, so a case competition is typically a competition where teams are given a few weeks to prepare a solution to a complex case study. And so every team does the same case study, but kind of year to year those case study topics have a pretty wide range and include health problems and populations from all over the world. So then kind of at the end of the preparation period, which is typically a few weeks, teams give a presentation explaining their solution to a panel of judges who then are typically experts in areas related to that specific case study and then teams spend about 20 minutes answering questions that the judges have.

Sophie Dollison:

So I’ve been involved in three case competitions and in the first year, we gave our presentation in-person, and then that was directly followed by 20 minutes of question and answer. But the other two times I’ve competed have been in a more virtual format because of the pandemic. And so with that, you prerecord about a 15-minute presentation and that is due a week before you kind of have a period of time for questions and then you do about 20 minutes of questions over Zoom with the judges.

Sophie Dollison:

But at the University of Iowa, the case competitions those teams that are involved are made up of individuals from various degree programs, disciplines, departments, and that’s part of the requirements. So you have to have, I can’t remember if it’s two or three kind of disciplines or departments present within your team, and then you also have to have at least one undergrad and at least one grad student on your team as well. So please anyone else who is on here kind of add what you need to, but that’s maybe a brief description of what the case competition’s like at the University of Iowa.

Alexis Clark:

Kori, the case competitions are more appealing to the health administration path. What differences did you hear from Sophie’s description that the MHA focused case studies kind of are tailored around?

Kori Thomas:

Yeah, so for the healthcare administration ones, we are pretty much required to just have MHA students. I think there have been some cases where we can have PhD students or executive MHA, MBA, but for the most part, ours have been just MHA students and it doesn’t have a requirement to have an undergrad student or someone from a different department join the case. And then ours are more, instead of more public health focused, they’re more healthcare system focused. I know the one that I’m doing now is more leaning towards health insurance. So that’s definitely a very different avenue to go down versus hospital operations and hospital strategy. So I think it really just depends what case you decide to do because I know the one Sophie has done in the past couple years, it’s been, like she said, broad topics in public health and for us it’s very focused in healthcare specifically.

Sophie Dollison:

Yeah. I can add though the case competition that I have done and kind of have described here is the global public health case competition that’s put by the Iowa Institute of Public Health Research and Policy and I think maybe some other departments, but I’m not quite sure I remember the other ones.

Alexis Clark:

Awesome. So maybe we can just go around the table here. And if you would describe which case competitions you’ve been involved in, how many you’ve been involved in, and then what really motivated you to originally sign up for your first case competition.

Kaleb Brooks:

Yeah. So I’ve done two so far and then will be doing my third next month. And so the first two that I’ve done were the global health case competition that Sophie just described. And then the third that I’m doing next month is through Emory and their international case competition. So excited to do that. And I initially signed up… One of my friends was interested in putting a team together and I never heard anything about it, but she told me more and it sounded really interesting. So I joined and then kept with that team in the last two years and into next month.

Alexis Clark:

Kori, what about you?

Kori Thomas:

I’ve competed in three. And the ones I’ve competed in, one was with Lexi for the Ohio State University one. The next one was the NAHSE case competition and that was a national one. And then the one I’m competing in now is the University of Alabama Birmingham case competition with top MHA programs. And I’d say what motivated me to sign up for these was the first one I was like, well, I have the time on my hands. I might as well… I think they’re a really good opportunity to set yourself apart from others when going to apply for an internship or a fellowship or even a job. And for at least the healthcare case competitions, a lot of these people remember you and they’re networking opportunities. And so they’re fun to network with other students, but also other executives.

Kori Thomas:

And then, excuse me, the second one was I was applying for fellowships at the time and it was a really good speaking point to just how I enjoy learning about healthcare and solving problems that a lot of other people have a hard time solving. So there always is a different response to that question I think when, oh, why did you sign up for this one? But I think at the end of the day, for me, it’s all in experience and the opportunity to connect with your colleagues and other executives.

Alexis Clark:

Absolutely. What about you Mekenna?

Mekenna Ollinger:

Yeah. So going off of Kori, I also did the NAHSE case competition. And like you talked about, I could speak to it in a lot of my internship interviews and I actually had an organization reach out to me to apply to their internships. So the case competition itself, that goes a lot further as far as networking. And then like the NAHSE case competition also offered like mock interviews, a virtual career fair. They looked at my resume and looked at it. So a lot of them are a little bit different case to case competition, but ours offered that, which was a huge plus for me. And then as a first year MHA student, I just really wanted to get myself involved and being in a case competition I figured could help me analyze data because I had very little experience in that. And then also creating more of that relationship feeling between different levels of the MHA program and the different people.

Mekenna Ollinger:

So I had a little bit of a unique experience because I was with Kori as second MHA student and then also Whit Delaney, who’s also a second year MHA student. So in that role I was obviously a little nervous because they had an internship on me and then they had all of their first year classes nailed down, their analytics class, and then their management class. So I really took a different approach as an intentional team member and really they could guide me in how to research properly, how to make a presentation that wasn’t too busy but was still really effective for our panelists. So I learned so much about what they have done so far, but then I’ve also learned a lot more about me and myself as part of a team.

Alexis Clark:

Sophie, what about you?

Sophie Dollison:

Yeah. So I originally kind of got into the case competition world through a GRA student who I was working with when I was doing my experiential learning in undergrad as a sophomore. So that was my first case competition. Again, it was at the College of Public Health here at the university and that one looked at addressing mental health Makoko, Nigeria. And then the second one I did was my first year of my MPH and that looked at chronic conditions in a detention center in Chiapas, Mexico. And then the most recent one was looking at racism in the healthcare system in Poland, kind of specifically looking at the Roma population. And those last two Kaleb and I were on the same team for. And I will also be joining him for the case competition at Emory, which is super exciting. And hopefully that goes well for us kind of in the spring.

Sophie Dollison:

But I think what kind of kept me coming back to these case competitions was kind of like Kori said, just like the problem solving aspect of it and being able to not only practice that for yourself, but also show that to other potential employers or professors or kind of other opportunities and gain that practice I think was really fun for me to do. And I think at least for the case competitions I did, they were very complex and very big and there were multiple kind of problems that were going on at the same time. And so I think then when I was doing other classwork or addressing things that weren’t as maybe big or global or complex, it felt a little easier because I already kind of had like thought through and practiced it on a much bigger level before. So I liked that as well.

Kori Thomas:

Sophie, those topics sound so fun. Obviously not fun, but they just sound very interesting to dive deep into.

Sophie Dollison:

Yeah. And they’re really interesting in the fact that like, I mean, for example, like the addressing chronic conditions in a detention center in Chiapas, Mexico, that was during theoretically like the pandemic. So trying to make sure you’re focusing on the actual problem and not like the infectious part of things that are happening or like the human rights violations that are going on in detention centers or things like that. It’s very hard to kind of like tease apart and make sure you’re addressing root causes, but also paying attention to the actual problem that the case study is calling you to. So yeah, it was fun in that regard. They’re fun.

Mekenna Ollinger:

I think it’d be awesome to do case competitions with different departments for us administrators because even though it’s really helpful to do things that we’re going to deal with every day, it’d be cool to see how you guys handled those kind of things.

Kaleb Brooks:

It’s definitely really interesting to have different perspectives on that because the ones that we did here at Iowa just had a requirement to have at least three departments, but all of the students that I worked with were from the College of Public Health just the different departments, but the one that Sophie and I are doing next month requires three different colleges. So we had to add some from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and I think from engineering was the other one that we added on. So it’ll be really interesting to see those perspectives as well.

Alexis Clark:

Wow, that does sound like it will be a great competition. Will you all go in-person for the one at Emory or is it all virtual?

Kaleb Brooks:

No, it’ll be virtual.

Alexis Clark:

Okay. So Sophie and maybe even Kori, as you’re preparing to go in-person to UAB, what was the preparation like in those different avenues? Presenting virtually is much different than presenting in-person. So what did that look like in terms of your preparation?

Kori Thomas:

Well, I know for kind of opposite from Sophie, I started both of my case comps virtual. And so now this one is in-person and it’s very different because obviously on Zoom, you can read your notes. You can prepare speech and you can read right off the screen. Now that we’re going in-person, we have to prepare all of our materials in a decent amount of time so we can prepare our speech and have it completely memorized and make sure that our slides have all the information we want on them and we’re speaking to everything we need to and then we can send it in. It’s just a lot more work that you have to do because you have to make sure that everyone is now presentable from head to toe versus from waist up and that everyone’s prepared their speech well enough. You have to trust your teammates that they put the work in to have all that memorized. So I guess we’ll see because obviously we have not gone to Alabama yet, but to be continued.

Sophie Dollison:

Yeah, I definitely agree with the kind of how much of presentable do you have to be kind of the waist up and things like that. I think also after doing both, I probably prefer virtual just because selfishly it allows me more time to kind of tailor exactly what I want to say and I get to highlight very concisely what I want to do in that presentation. And then at least for the ones that I’ve done, we’ve had a week kind of in between. So we’ve turned in that video of how we’re presenting virtually and then can kind of acknowledge that, oh, we really focused on X, Y, and Z during the presentation. When they ask us questions, we’ll focus on these other things or things like that.

Sophie Dollison:

So it’s much more kind of like on your toes in-person. And I think with that, we had less kind of maybe points to focus on because the judges are seeing that for the very first time and then asking you questions right away whereas with the virtual competitions, I think… And granted I also learned a lot kind of my first year doing it. So I feel like part of it was that. But I think just in general, it has allowed my team to be a little bit more intricate in what we want our case to look like and how we want to present it.

Alexis Clark:

So a question for the table again. What in your experiences has been the most challenging aspect of case competitions, but also the most rewarding?

Kaleb Brooks:

I’d say definitely the most challenging is the time crunch. And not just because I think we had three or four weeks for the one here at Iowa, which sounds like a lot of time, but when you’re trying to figure out schedules between four or five different people to come together and then we also had a faculty mentor that we had to meet with several times to kind of help guide our thoughts on the topic and finding time to meet with them was also a challenge. So just all the different things to balance while you’re still attending classes and having all the meetings for those. Definitely the time crunch was most challenging, but rewarding is it’s just go, go, go the entire time. And then finally at the end we had that week to just kind of look back on our presentation and be like, oh, wow, we actually did that and we put it together and we got it together in time. So it’s always super, super rewarding to see the final product at the end of that rush time.

Kori Thomas:

Yeah, I have to agree. The time crunch really stinks sometimes. Like every case I’ve had now it’s been either three or four weeks I’ve never done like a 24 hour or seven day kind of one, but it’s the time crunch, it’s the amount of research and detail you should be going into because I know for the two hospital ones I’ve done, they want you to go in serious detail because they want the finances. They want to see how is this really going to help us? And you have to know pretty much every avenue. It could go wrong, it could go well. It’s just a lot you have to look into. But on top of that, you have to have your research done probably after two weeks. And then that last week you’re preparing your presentation, your speech, your executive summary, just like so many different things.

Kori Thomas:

And so you really only have two full weeks to sit with the case, ask your questions, delegate the responsibilities, and then it’s crunch time at the end. But the positives I would say are the skills you gain after what Sophie was talking about is you go to class and you get a department issue or you get just this one smaller public health issue and it doesn’t seem that big, but everyone else is like, “Oh my God, this is such a big issue.” Versus you’re looking at things nationally. You’re looking at things way broader than that.

Kori Thomas:

So I’d say that was definitely a skill that I developed over the two case competitions. And now after this one, I have the skill of health insurance, which no one wants to deal with that. I don’t even think we really fully understand health insurance. But also the last positive is like I was saying earlier, the networking aspect. You get so many positives out of case competitions. I think a majority of at least alumni who have competed, they competed solely for just the opportunity to… Because it was in the past always in-person, you get to go to these cocktail hours, these guest speakers that get to come in, the resume review, the mock interviews, like all these different things, they’re taking your name down and your name is being sent out to just different organizations. So it’s a give and take at times.

Mekenna Ollinger:

Yeah. For NAHSE, we had that virtual social hour. I remember that. That was fun, with all the different people. But going off of you, Kori, when I joined, since this was my first one, I did not realize the time commitment and you’re like, we need to do it this day, this day, this day for so many hours. And obviously it is very hard. There was times when I was like, “Ah, I don’t know if I can do this because school’s my priority.” But as we kept advancing and we kept like holding each other to it, it was so worth it in the end. And then like you talked about, our maternal health topic has come up in so many of my classes and I’ve been able to speak through it from like some of the data that we found as well.

Kori Thomas:

Yeah. And I guess one last point is for Mekenna, it was helpful to have someone who did not have the experience that way and I had just because at the end of the day we will go home or go somewhere and have to explain kind of what we’re doing as an organization, as employees to a level that they can understand. And Mekenna, she’s a first year, had half of a semester under her belt. And so Whit and I, we really had to work together how can we kind of disseminate this information to her in an efficient way so she is able to contribute the way she wants to?

Kori Thomas:

And that was definitely a learning experience because you just expect people to be on the same knowledge level when you’re a second year because that’s all you’re working with. But when working with someone who was a first year, you just relearn those skills of how can I help you? How can I help teach you these topics so you can contribute? And it was helpful. And I think Mekenna did a great job kind of understanding our complex topics that we would talk about and asking questions when she didn’t understand. So that was a positive for I’d say both of us.

Mekenna Ollinger:

Yeah, that was awesome. Thanks for that, Kori.

Sophie Dollison:

I think for me, I already maybe touched on what was the most challenging. I think it is really kind of, especially in the global kind of case competitions is discerning kind of what problems are outside your scope, what are kind of there just to throw you off and then what root causes actually do need to be addressed in order to influence kind of that main problem that you’re focusing on. And then the beginning is just so overwhelming. These cases are just so big. You’re like, oh my goodness, where do I start? What do I do? There’s so much to research, but I promise you get through and I promise you have so many other members on your team to kind of help you get through it and divvy up the kind of the work that you have to do.

Sophie Dollison:

And I think that kind of leads into maybe some of the most rewarding parts is it’s really getting to work on that with your team. I love group work. So I really enjoyed like being there with people that wanted to be there that wanted to produce like a solution that was appropriate and that was good for this situation. So I really liked that aspect of it. And I think it also helped me kind of know how to interact with like people from different departments that were being trained from like a slightly different perspective and things like that and kind of see where I fit in, where they fit in, where we complimented each other.

Sophie Dollison:

And it doesn’t necessarily have to be department specific. That can just be kind of your normal strikes and weaknesses of different people. And then I also really liked just the feedback that I got from the judges, whether if it was negative or positive, hopefully it was positive more, but I think that was just really helpful to kind of know what they viewed as being like a good idea or one that could be built upon or things like that. I thought that was really valuable as well.

Kori Thomas:

Yeah. Sophie, that’s a really great point is the feedback. The feed feedback I want to say is almost some of the most valuable aspects of a case competition because I don’t know Lexi if we got emailed our feedback from OSU, but I know for NAHSE they emailed all of the scorecards from each round that we competed at. And I remember there were some teams with… And we had a call too. There was a call giving feedback as well. And just kind of overarching here’s what we saw from a lot of teams. And like for example, some teams had their finances… Their solution is profitable the first year they implement it. And the feedback was you know that that’s most likely not going to be the case. Like it’s hearing that feedback for other teams that’s helpful for me and like the feedback on we really liked empty slides pretty much. Like you don’t have that much… It’s those little skills that they plug into your feedback that you take to your classes, to your job. It was super helpful. So I 100% agree.

Alexis Clark:

I think just as someone that has competed in a case competition and has been actively a fan of case competitions since joining the University of Iowa, you can tell when someone’s presenting if they have participated in case competitions because their slides look different, they’re much more concise, and I just think it adds an element of sophistication to how you complete the rest of your studies. So going off of that, what advice do you have for current or prospective students that may be interested in participating in case competitions? Kaleb, do you want to start us off?

Kaleb Brooks:

Yeah. Yeah. I would say the biggest one at least for me and my teams has been to not focus on one thing too quickly or to think that you have to stick with your first idea and just develop that because I know especially the first year, we were really stressed out with the time crunch and stuff. And so we thought, oh, we had this idea and we just have to develop this and go with that and stick with this idea. But then at our first meeting with our mentor, we discovered we had completely misinterpreted the thought. And so we had to go back to square one and completely start from scratch. And that was really scary because we only had a couple weeks left at that point, but it ended up being a much better product at the end. And I think that showed us that you don’t have to go with the first idea always even though you’re short onto time, but still take the time to think and go back to square one if you need to because it’ll really make it better in the end.

Mekenna Ollinger:

Kaleb, that’s really great advice. So for Kori and I, we kind of had the same thing. We picked a topic and then we had a shift of a couple of team members and we actually completely changed it. And that ended up being a much better option for us. So I think that’s really great advice. And then my advice for incoming students and current students would be to do it. Everything we’ve talked about is very true as far as like the networking, like I’ve already talked about. You can use it in job interviews, you can use it throughout your classes and like presentations like Lexi had touched on. You can definitely tell the difference between who’s had the analytical experience and who has not. All of the stuff we’ve talked about is definitely worth to do it.

Alexis Clark:

Mekenna, you had mentioned earlier that you had to kind of reevaluate or evaluate what your role on a specific team was. So looking back, what advice do you have when working with a couple other people that you don’t know very well, especially when you don’t know their strengths or weaknesses? And Sophie and Kaleb are about to go work with other colleges, what advice do you have for people to realize what role do I fit in this dynamic on a team?

Mekenna Ollinger:

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So I had to kind of sit back and see how Kori and Whit were in a team setting. And then I also had to get really comfortable with asking questions. I often apologized to Kori and Whit and said like, “I’m sorry, I really don’t know how to take this or handle this or what direction to go in.” So just being comfortable with being up front and saying, I don’t really know what I’m doing. Can you guys give me some advice? Can you give me some things to look up? So that would be like the main thing is just being comfortable with the unknown and then kind of taking that approach of being observant or just straight up asking what they want their role to be in a case competition.

Kori Thomas:

Yeah, that’s a really good point because right now obviously health insurance is not my strong suit. I don’t think it’s any of my team members’ strong suit. And so we found ourselves saying, okay, I have a dumb question. And it’s like, I told myself and my team members, we need to stop saying that because we are in a completely different area of healthcare that we have had very little training on. And I think the first piece of advice is there is no such thing as a dumb question. Like the possibilities are endless. And until you can prove so, you go with it.

Kori Thomas:

Like when you choose to sign up for that case competition and you come in, you read that case and you sit down and you say, oh my gosh, I have this idea, this idea, this idea, this idea, you research all those ideas, you research who’s done it, you research what has to go into it, and then you can eliminate, okay, yeah, this was definitely not a good idea, but like don’t limit yourself to, oh, either it’s a stupid idea or do I really know what I’m doing? And just go with it. I think the best thing to do that I have done is say my idea and look more into it. And my teammates, for every case comp, they have been very supportive. And we ask those who we are able to ask, hey, what are your thoughts on this idea? And that’s when I can eliminate that thought.

Kori Thomas:

And I think the second piece of advice I have is similar to Mekenna’s is just do it. You’re going to go through a few crying sessions when you are in these case competitions, okay? And it is 100% normal and you are going to be so stressed because you have 50 million things to do for school, 50 million things to do for work, and then 50 million things to do for this case competition. But at the end of the day, you are learning how to time manage, you are learning how to work in a group, you’re learning how to solve problems. There are more benefits than downsides of a case competition.

Kori Thomas:

Like that’s what I tell every single person who is potentially thinking of it. Like every single time I’m in a case, I say, why did I do this to myself? Why did I do this to myself? And why did I do this to myself? Every time. I kid you not, it is every time. And then when I’m done, I look back or we’re… Like for NAHSE, we were in the finals and I was like, “That’s right. That’s right.” Give it a round of applause because the amount of work that you put into it, and even if you don’t make it to the finals, the amount of work you had to put into it, you are so proud of yourself at the end because you didn’t give up and you signed up. It was completely optional and you chose to show up for yourself, your school, your program, and your teammates every single day. And you chose to do that. So I would say just do it.

Sophie Dollison:

That was great. I love that. Very empowering. So thank you so much for that, Kori. I 100% agree with everything you just said. I think it’s really easy to convince yourself to not do it when really you should just kind of jump head first and to do it. I’m so glad I did it. It really will be one of the things that I miss when I graduate. And I think our team definitely had some similar moments of kind of during the competition we were like, why were we here? What’s going on? You see who the judges are going to be and you’re like, “Well, I don’t know if they’re going to like my intervention,” or things like that. And I think our motto towards the end at least for my team for this year was we are proud of our intervention and we made an intervention that we think we would be successful, that we are comfortable with what we did. That is appropriate for the culture and the context. And it’s all about if you are proud of it.

Sophie Dollison:

And so I guess maybe for some of my advice… I guess first before I say that, I do want to say that least for my experience with undergrad and graduate capstone classes, very similar to case competitions. So I would recommend doing the case competition because of that because then it makes some of those classes a little bit easier. At least that’s not your first time kind of seeing a case. And then I think my biggest piece of advice is really to focus on the community and the context first. I think that can kind of be at least for like the global public health case competitions or things like that where the community really is essential, I think that can kind of be the kryptonite for some groups if they don’t consider it. So I think if you’re doing a case competition where this makes sense, before you even think about solutions or ideas, it is essential for you to really orient yourself within the community in the context and what’s available, what’s been going on, what’s the history before you assume what’s best for that area.

Alexis Clark:

Absolutely. After all that advice, I’m like, I should have done another one. But hindsight’s always 2020 and I commend all of you for participating in them. And I just wanted to take a second wish Sophie and Kaleb the best of luck at Emory and then Kori and her team at UAB and all of the other students that will be representing Iowa this spring with case competitions. Any closing remarks from anyone?

Kori Thomas:

Still Iowa. Woo-hoo. Thanks for having us Lexi.

Alexis Clark:

That’s it for episode this week. Big thanks to Kaleb, Kori, Sophie, and Mekenna for coming onto the show with us. This episode was hosted, [inaudible 00:32:11], edited, and produced by Alexis Clark. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues. Our team can be reached at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Stay happy, stay healthy, and keep learning.