Eason Chin ’27 (finance), L Zheng ’27 (management information systems), and Riston Bertoli ’27 (business exploration), representing RIT as “Chin Industries,” placed third in the MikesBikes World Champs Competition sponsored by Smartsims Business Simulators.
In the international event, which included 73 participants from 20 schools, student teams competed using MikesBikes Introduction and Advanced Simulators. The Chin Industries team was advised by Molly McGowan, Saunders senior lecturer in management.
RIT students are required to participate in MikesBikes as part of team projects in their Business Management 101 course. At the conclusion of the project, those students that did well in the simulation are invited by SMARTSIM to participate in the global championship.
Reflecting on the competition, Eason Chin says, “It was a lot of thinking and planning. Backup plans were prepared for every strategy because you can't anticipate what the other teams are going to do. It was a lot of sitting down under a whiteboard and just thinking.”
Chin was especially pleased to have the chance to use Game Theory, which he had been exposed to in Microeconomics: “We had to predict what the other teams were going to do and put ourselves in their shoes.”
Finally, Chin sees MikesBikes as an excellent opportunity for students to compete and bond.
“Doing the competition as a team,” he says, “allowed us to share our business acumen with each other and form stronger friendships with one another.”
This competition and others like it–for example, RIT students’ success in the Bloomberg 2023 Global Trading Challenge–are instances of RIT’s and Saunders’ commitment to experiential learning, which also includes co-op, simulations, activities offered by the Albert J. Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and other “experiences that turn knowledge into know-how.”
