Battle of the Builds
JMU Students Face Off in Freddie Mac’s LEGO Competition
Anthony Donahue and Elliot Foreman spent an hour last spring building a house using LEGOs®. They had such a great time, they decided to do it again this fall and invite a few of their friends.
With four additional team members, Donahue and Foreman, both business majors, signed up for the Freddie Mac Battle of the Builds LEGO Competition with hopes of winning a GPS or an iPod docking station, plus some cash for the student organization of their choice. They registered as the Beta Alpha Psi team.
Building Relationships
The LEGO competition, sponsored by Freddie Mac, is part of a pilot initiative by the company to build stronger relations with the JMU community.
“We’ve always had a great recruiting relationship with JMU’s College of Business and have more than 100 alumni working with us,” says Heidi Cuthbertson, college relations specialist for Freddie Mac. But the company, she says, wants to expand that relationship to the larger JMU community by providing speakers, educational opportunities and funding. The initiative led to the LEGO competition in spring 2007, an event that drew more than 20 teams and a crowd of observers.
And who better to help pull off the competition than a group of JMU alumni. An alumni team worked with Maribeth Herod (’82), vice president of Financial Information Technology for Freddie Mac. Herod, also a member of the CoB’s Executive Advisory Council, was the impetus behind the relationship-building initiative with JMU, says Cuthbertson.
Building Teams
So, how did the Beta Alpha Psi team fair in the competition? Their beach house didn’t win the prize, but they produced a detailed beach home, complete with a pool and a lighthouse, in less than two hours using LEGO blocks.
Their strategy: Divide into teams of two and split the tasks. One team worked on the house, another on the pool and the third on the lighthouse.
“If everybody is doing the same thing, it just doesn’t work,” says Cara Perrone, a team member with a double major in accounting and Hotel and Tourism Management. This strategy, adds Perrone, is similar to one she and another set of teammates adopted while completing a business plan as part of their CoB coursework.
Creating a LEGO home is more than just an exercise in elementary building skills. It takes critical thinking and teamwork to develop a successful product quickly and efficiently. And those skills, says Perrone, she and her teammates honed in CoB courses.
According to Taarna Scaccia (’07), a recent hire at Freddie Mac, the team building skills have been most useful in her new position.
“It’s all team oriented,” she says. Scaccia, marketing major, ended up working as an investor tax reporter, not what she intended. But her skills in a variety of business-related areas and exposure to finance through teamwork in COB 300 prepared her for a career shift. “I’m learning so many new things,” she says referring her current immersion in the language of finance, but admits that her well-rounded CoB education and participation on integrated teams gave her a head start.
As for the Beta Alpha Psi team, they admit when pressed that their developing business savvy helped them work well as a team; but they really entered the competition “just for fun.”
Oct. 3, 2007