有没有想过你是否真的可以两全其美？ If you ask the 太阳城娱乐官网 students who recently participated in a couple of major competitions, they’ll tell you that their school has figured out how to use the coziness of small class size to their advantage. These University of Nebraska at Kearney students were recently able to prove that you don’t have to attend a large university to compete with one. 

Thanks to the experiential learning ubiquitous in classrooms across 太阳城娱乐官网’s campus, these two groups of students put what they do on a daily basis to use while competing against students from larger universities. While these competitions were not part of their course requirements, these students were able to not only utilize what they’ve learned in class but also gain a better understanding of how to apply what they will ultimately use in their future professions. According to Interior and Product Design student Abby Mieras, the competition she attended “very much connected to everything” she does in class. 

For these students, three who are majoring in Construction Management (CM) and two studying Interior and Product Design (IPD), traveling to Las Vegas to attend the National Association of 回家builders yearly competition validated the work they’ve done all semester. 尽管他们的比赛作业是独立于课堂作业的，但从9月到2月，这群学生每周都会开会，为比赛做准备。 

该团队由CM学生Alex Alba， Mitchell Knapp和Keenan Torres以及IPD学生Avery Day和Abby Mieras组成。 在Jared Burgoon博士的赞助下，这些学生努力学习建造定制房屋所需的知识。 According to Mieras, they learned how to “build the house from the ground up.” 在9月份收到问题陈述后，团队获得了该项目的地点以及100万美元的预算。 他们完成了一份市场分析、一份施工前管理计划、一份施工管理计划、一份销售和营销计划以及一份财务和风险分析。 12月中旬，该团队向评委提交了他们的提案，评委是这个项目的假想投资者。 They then worked together to create the presentations for February’s competition. 

As Mieras shared, this simulation “will be very helpful going forward” as she prepares for her future career. 她和Avery Day很快意识到，他们需要与团队的施工管理成员合作，以了解整个项目。 Grateful for this experience, an extension of the experiential learning taught in her classes, Mieras stated that she realized she had fallen “way more in love with what (she’s) studying.” 

今年，其他商业和技术学院的学生也有类似的经历。 今年2月，一个由四名商科学生组成的小组前往太阳城娱乐官网林肯市参加田纳西州商业挑战赛（Tenaska business Challenge），这项比赛是由能源行业一家领先的私营公司赞助的。 这支由特拉维斯·霍尔曼先生赞助的队伍由克洛伊·达肯、贝西亚·汉密尔顿、奥马尔·桑切斯和布雷特·施泰因克组成。

Chloe Dakan, a senior business student who is majoring in marketing, states that making a fake business plan for a fleet of electrical cars for this competition “solidified what (she’s been) doing” in her classes. She stated that her team has “realized that choosing 太阳城娱乐官网 was the best option for us” because they were not afraid to put to use, at this competition, the type of hands-on learning they experience in their college classes. 

As Bethia Hamilton shared, their team’s project was “more outside-the-box than what every other university” went with. 这个团队从一开始就有一种不同的心态，一种团队的心态，她觉得当她进入管理领域时，这种心态对她很有用。 

According to Hamilton, she walked away from this experience excited that “everything (she had) learned, (she) was able to apply” to this project. Crediting experiences at 太阳城娱乐官网 such as Dr. Daniel Chaffin’s MGT400-Entrepreneurship class as one of “the benefits of going to a smaller school,” she explained how she felt prepared to “participate in larger scale” experiences like this competition. 

Thanks to the experiential learning that’s the hallmark of 太阳城娱乐官网, these 商业与技术学院 students were able to take what they’ve enjoyed in their small classes and compete well with students from much larger universities. 回到太阳城娱乐官网，两个团队都认为他们每天学到的东西有助于他们创建和分享演示文稿，这些演示文稿不仅给评委留下了深刻的印象，而且给了每个人一些思考的东西。