Chadron State SIFE team does well again
The Students in Free Enterprise team from Chadron State College continued its string of successes at the National Exposition last week in Kansas City.
Dr. Rick Koza, associate professor of business at CSC and the SIFE sponsor, said Chadron State tied for 13th in the final standings at exposition. There were 170 entries from across the nation. About 4,000 students were in attendance.
This is the fifth consecutive year that Chadron State has ranked among the top 15 in the final national standings. The CSC team is one of just four to finish among the top 15 all five years. The CSC team ranked among the top 10 three of those years.
About 800 teams participate in SIFE. The Chadron State entry was one of four to advance from its eight-state region to the National Exposition.
Koza said the competition is getting tougher and the emphasis is changing. He said a number of colleges and universities are receiving large contributions from corporations to support SIFE activities and that during the judging this year projects that netted a profit seemed to be favored over teaching and training activities.
Major projects by the Chadron State team included advising students at the Pine Ridge Job Corps Center on job-seeking skills, joining with members of the CSC International Club to present a program on diversity to 120 rural school students, providing personal finance information to freshmen at Pine Ridge High School in South Dakota, helping Chadron eighth and ninth graders organize the sale of pizza to raise funds for a trip to Washington, D.C., and Ads for Kids, a program in which elementary students draw advertisements that appeared in the Chadron Record.
The SIFE team also hosted U.S. Rep. Tom Osborne’s Ag Entrepreneurship Workshop at CSC in January and consulted with several area businesses.
Altogether, Koza said the approximately one dozen team members combined for more than 2,350 hours of community service in 2005-06.
Koza said one of the major benefits Chadron State students have realized from participating in SIFE is meeting business executives who judge the competition. He said in recent several CSC students have taken jobs after they were interviewed at the national expo.
Team members who went to Kansas City are Megan Boyle, North Platte; Nick Davis, Rapid City; Brandon Doke, Ainsworth; Lacey Gulbranson, Mitchell; Seth Hu1quist and Jamie Mills, Alliance; Jessi Moore, Gering; Aleyse Schultz, Dickens.
Category: Campus News