UNBC has again taken a trophy at the JDC-West championships.
Each year the universities of Western Canada meet up for the Jeux du Commerce, where the best of their respective business departments represent their schools in 10 categories all pertaining to some aspect of marketing and economics.
There were 12 universities at the 2014 edition, held in Regina this past weekend.
"Every year we have come back with at least one trophy, and this year we did so again - and it was a big one," said Charles Scott, a UNBC instructor and one of the JDC-West coaches.
Part of the competition is a fundraising effort each school must put forth in their home community for a charity of the students' choice. The effort is catalogued and submitted to the central judges.
"We won the trophy for raising the most money," said Scott. "Of the $250,000 raised among the 12 teams, UNBC raised $71,000 of it. We were the smallest school of business and the smallest community population of the bunch, and it wasn't even close. By far, our students raised the most money."
Each school determines which charity it will support, and all that money gathered by UNBC went to the Spirit of the North Healthcare Foundation.
In several categories, UNBC's team was within a few percentage points of getting on the podium which, said Scott, "was trophy enough for the coaches" who worked for months preparing the students. In every event, UNBC was a distant underdog that rose to the occasion.
"It is incredibly close and it shouldn't be when you consider we are up against schools that have more faculty than we have students," said Scott. "Sauder School of Business has more students than Quesnel has people, and SFU isn't much different. Other than UBC-Okanagan, with a similar business school population, these schools are all several times larger than us, and yet we are neck and neck in basically every category, year after year."
Scott credits the competitive spirit of the students and the dedicated mentorship of the local coaches - experts in each category who step forward each year to uplift the theoretical learning the students do - with those consistently strong results.
"The coaches do this because of the personal development we see in the students," said Scott. "These people are nowhere near, at the end of this process, who they were at the beginning. We have talked about this, as coaches, and most do this because of the transformations we see in them. And these are people who go on into our local business world and contribute to our economy and our society, or they go out into the world as ambassadors of UNBC and Prince George. It gives us a lot of pride to see what can happen through the JDC-West process."
