Four Chaminade students and three staff members are headed to Memphis, Tenn., to present two ethical cases in the International Assembly for Collegiate Business Education (IACBE) 2016 conference. This will be Chaminade’s fourth year competing, winning overall two out of the three years.

Professors Richard Kido, Wayne Tanna and Carolyn Kuriyama will accompany senior business students Calee Goya and Jaycee-Rae Almeida, junior business student Judy Ng, and junior communications student Chantelle Aguilar as they participate in the four-day conference.

Dean Schroeder and service-learning director Candice Sakuda will also be in attendance.

The four students and their advisors practiced for over 11 hours a day throughout spring break and were meeting every day after school from 5-11 p.m. thereafter.

“It’s definitely a good experience,” said Almeida. “For me, in college, I’ve never had anything this stressful. This is my stress for all four years in one month.”

Their assignment was to present a case on an ethical dilemma that relates to business, which will be presented on Wednesday. The case they chose to do revolved around whether the Thirty Meter Telescope corporation should build the 30-meter telescope while “desecrating” Mauna Kea, the most sacred land in the Pacific.

On Thursday, they will have to present a case that IACBE gives to them. They will have four hours to research and make a script and PowerPoint.

Each case presentation needs to be 20-minutes long and follows with a 10-minute section for questions. The group needs to present both their prepared and impromptu cases twice to the judges.

“It’s really learning how to go with the flow,” said Ng. “Our only problem at the moment is really figuring out what to say and when is a good time to say certain things for the Q&A section. Since we’ve researched for over a month, we have so much information, and it’s really hard to just dig it all up in a second.”

This will be Chaminade’s fourth year participating in the IACBE competition. The university has placed in all three years of attendance, winning overall twice, giving the advisors experience and knowledge on how to prepare.

“Kuriyama is more of the communications, delivery coach,” said Goya. “While Kido is more content and research, making sure we have all the business aspects lined up, since this is a business ethics competition. And Tanna is more of the ethics guy, to make sure we have the right ethical theory.”

As for the four students, they each bring their own skills to the team.

“They all are business majors, so they all bring that expertise,” said Aguilar of her three teammates. “They know a lot about business and numbers, which I don’t. So while they bring that to the table I feel I bring the more creative style because I am working on the PowerPoint, and because I am a communications major, I feel I am more experienced in talking and communicating with people.”

While researching the topic as a whole, each student had a specific part to gain knowledge upon. Goya is into finance, so she researched the finance portion of the case, while Ng found love in nature and researched the environmental impacts. Aguilar found the legal issues more appealing and became most knowledgeable on that, and Almeida did everything in between, such as doing the research on the telescope as a whole, the sciences behind it and the Native Hawaiian aspects of the case.

The competition will be held on April 5-8 at Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tenn.

“I’m kind of nervous,” said Ng. “There is a lot of pressure to keep the reputation Chaminade has, but I’m excited because of the team we have.”