An interdisciplinary team of students from Prairie View A&M University took home the top prize in Phillips 66’s (P66) Black Employee Network (BEN) Case Competition. A total of 10 students from PVAMU and 15 students from Texas Southern University (divided into teams of five) participated in the competition on September 14 at P66’s headquarters in Houston.
“This year’s case challenged teams to analyze various means to transport fuel from Phillips 66’s Houston facility to its New Orleans facility, a real-life scenario,” said PVAMU College of Business Instructor Clyde McNeil. “PVAMU’s team was comprised of Amber Diehl (senior accounting major), Dannick Boyogueno (senior marketing major), Asia Brown (junior accounting major), Brandyn Smith (junior finance major), and Amber Felder (sophomore computer science major). They built a cost profit model that took into not only consideration labor and storage costs constraints, but also weather patterns and the cost of safety and environmental remediation to generate a solution that successfully resonated with the judges. They supported their solution with effective quantitative and qualitative analysis in addition to successfully getting through an intense Q&A with a panel of recruiters and management.”
For the past three years, P66 has hosted the BEN competition during its university recruitment season. The goal is to showcase the talent developed at HBCUs, create more career opportunities for local HBCU students, and recruit business, engineering and technology students for the company’s summer internship program as well as full-time opportunities.
“Having observed this event for the last three years, I would say the measure in which we evaluate this opportunity is not in who wins and losses, but more so in the opportunities afforded to students,” said McNeil. “PVAMU students typically leave this competition with a renewed sense of purpose, direction, and formulation of a game plan after self-assessing where they stack up against other students. I’ve seen students interview better, take on additional leadership roles, and seek out more chances to get out of their comfort zones.”