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Entrepreneurship Spotlight: University of Arizona

By Jesse Lewis (past articles)
University of Arizona
09/26/2005

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The highly ranked University of Arizona men's basketball team isn't that school's only squad turning heads nationally. In fact, the UA's Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) group has come just shy of a national title three years in a row.

SIFE is a global non-profit organization dedicated to promoting market economics, entrepreneurship, personal financial success skills and business ethics on university campuses.

The Arizona SIFE team has organized at least 23 educational outreach projects teaching the ins and outs of economics, offering credit advice and providing job experience. At competition, SIFE teams present the results of their projects and compete to determine which team was most successful at creating economic opportunity for others.

Arizona has been the runner-up in the organization's national team competition for the past three years. Winners of the national competition advance to the SIFE World Cup to compete against 800 teams from 46 countries.

Though the SIFE team hasn't taken home the gold yet, they are working hard to improve their projects and make them bigger and better for the next competition, said Juan Ciscomani, UA political science alum and former SIFE president.

Selling School Spirit

The team's projects center around four criteria: business ethics, market economics, entrepreneurship, and personal financial success. One of the projects includes a completely student-run retail store inside the Tucson Mall, staffed by 10 SIFE members and offering UA paraphernalia to mall shoppers.

In a partnership with the UA Bookstore, which supplies the store with its school apparel, the A Store provides members the opportunity to work with visual merchandise, marketing products and buying inventory.

Students also receive behind the scenes experience in running a store, setting up displays, promoting the store, and they receive one credit for working there, said Amy Ryan, a UA retailing and consumer sciences senior and the store's co-manager.

With Tucson's proximity to Mexico, the team has created a workshop called "Vamos a Tucson" to teach American retailers how to appeal to and properly serve Mexican shoppers. The team provides reference material such as common Spanish phrases and words to help non-bilingual retailers communicate better with Spanish-speaking customers, said Ciscomani.

A major point the Vamos a Tucson presentation indicates is the need to pay attention to children shopping with parents from Mexico. Ciscomani said that the kids are usually the ones who speak English and translate for their parents.

According to Ciscomani, $340 million is spent in Pima County alone by Mexican consumers every year, and UA's SIFE team makes their presentations at mall management meetings. Wal-Mart and Finish Line have requested workshops in the future.

The chapter also started a group to help students with their credit problems. The Credit-Wise Cats offer credit advice and suggest ways to deal with debt.

"The mission of the Credit-Wise Cats is to foster and support the development of sound financial management practices for children, youth, college students and adults," according to the UA's SIFE website.

According to the site, the team has conducted 82 personal finance workshops for dorm residents, financial aid recipients, elementary and high school students and more than 1,250 people were advised on financial practices. After the workshops, surveys showed knowledge of personal finance increased by at least 36 percent.

Duel in the Desert

The team also created a regional SIFE competition, "Duel in the Desert," centered on the Credit-Wise Cats. The Duel began in 2003-2004 with schools submitting proposals to host regional case study competitions.

Based on submitted proposals, Purdue University, Colorado State University, Texas A&M, and the University of South Carolina were chosen as the sites for regional Duels, and those competitions hosted 22 SIFE-affiliated schools.

In March the teams traveled to Tucson to compete in the national Duel in the Desert. Eleven teams spent the next 36 hours developing a workable solution for the Duel's most challenging personal financial case study yet.

After two rounds of presentation, a panel of 29 expert judges from across the country selected Ohio State as the national champion. A student survey showed 63 percent of the participants claimed that they would start a personal finance program at their own schools as a result of participating in the competition.

"The biggest thing about SIFE really is the impact the students make, compared with other student groups I've been involved in," said Ryan.