Meeting Chongo Bwalya, BCom/18, it is difficult to imagine that public speaking was one of her biggest fears when she entered university. In high school, she was not involved in many clubs, but decided that needed to change when she started at Sprott. She chose to join DECA, because of her competitive spirit and because she wanted to improve her public speaking.
Chongo said that DECA was fun and the short presentations created a good learning environment. The older students were seasoned presenters, and Chongo looked at this as an opportunity to learn from them.
“I saw a really big difference in my confidence just from the beginning of first year to the end of that year,” expressed Chongo. “So I stuck with it in my second year, and in my third year I decided to go a little bit further and get into business case analysis.”
The third year class, BUSI 3800, prepares students for case competitions. Chongo said this was the hardest course she ever took, but it taught her presentation skills and how to accept criticism.
“I remember after every presentation we would do, the professor would debrief us on every single thing we needed to improve on. At first it stung a little bit, but after a little while, I was like, ‘give me all of the criticism!’ Because at the end of the day it just teaches you how to be better. That put me in the mindset of trying to grow myself as a person,” said Chongo.
It was Chongo’s success in this class that got her an invitation to be on the Sprott team competing at the 2017 Network of International Business Schools (NIBS) case competition. The group of four headed to Finland to compete, where Chongo made friends with students from across the world. The competition came down to a final case about HR and Chongo had the most experience in that topic out of her group.
“I remember I was going to let one of the other group members [present the recommendation] because I honestly just didn’t have confidence that I could present it as well as one of them could,” Chongo recalled. “And I remember one of my group members looked at me and said, ‘Chongo, you know how to do this. You need to have faith in yourself. The only person here who can do this is you.’”
All of the other teams had been eliminated, so a large group was in the room for Chongo’s presentation. The presentations were also being live streamed around the world. As she stood in front of them, she felt as though everything she had learned in university was leading to this moment. With her training from DECA, BUSI 3800 and Sprott Competes, she presented the recommendation. With that final case, the Sprott team won first place.
On top of Chongo’s extracurricular involvement, she won the University Medal for the highest marks in her Bachelors of Commerce graduating class. She said winning the medal was a complete surprise because she knew the work she was putting into her classes, but did not know what everybody else was doing. This aligned with her advice for Sprott students to avoid comparing themselves to other students. Everybody has different interests and will take different paths to success.
Chongo is now working as a consultant within the risk advisory practice at Deloitte. She said that case competitions prepared her for this role by being able to observe organizations, analyze how to overcome certain risks and present these findings to the clients.
“[Case competitions] taught me how to be really professional, and that’s something I use even today working at Deloitte, even talking with clients,” said Chongo. “Two, it taught me how to convince someone of the value of something. I think a lot of the times in business, you have an idea that you think is great, and it could be an amazing idea, but the place where a lot of people fall short is they don’t know how to communicate that value to somebody else.”