St. Joe’s students attend second Jesuit Business Student Alliance conference

From March 24 to March 25, two students from Saint Joseph’s University had the opportunity to attend the Jesuit Business Student Alliance (JBSA) conference, held at Fordham University.

The JBSA was formed in 2013, and after gaining interest and resources, the first conference was held at St. Joe’s in 2016.

“The purpose is really to create networks and opportunities for students to meet one another, talk about Jesuit business experiences and then also create networks with each alumni group,” said Patrick O’Brien, Associate Dean, Undergraduate Program of the Erivan K. Haub School of Business.

The idea for the conference stemmed from a conference for associate deans of Jesuit business schools in the United States.

“One year we were talking about collaboration and from that conference came the idea that we should start a student group so we could create opportunities for students to network,” O’Brien said.

Jon Lemanski, ’18, a double major in business intelligence and sports marketing was one of the students who had the opportunity to attend the conference this year.

Lemanski is part of the Business Leadership Council (BLC) at St. Joe’s and is on the JBSA subcommittee. He said that the conference allowed him to gain more experience on how to think on his feet.

“We were assigned to compete in a case competition with little time to prepare and had to come up with a presentation on our school’s best practices,” Lemanski said. “Both of these presentations furthered my knowledge and gave me the confidence to present on topics that I had learned only a few weeks before.”

Megan Collins, ’20, was the other student who attended the conference. “They took us to the Ernst and Young innovation center [on Fordham’s campus]. They talked to us about innovation and building sustainable businesses,” Collins explained. “The next morning, we did a case study that we had been given a few weeks before where we had to work with students from different Jesuit schools to answer question about a violation crisis in India. They gave us about an hour and a half to get with our groups and then present it.”

There were four groups at the conference, each made up of five students. “

The main thing I took away was how similar all of the Jesuit schools are,” Lemanski said. “Whether you are from Fordham, Saint Louis [University], Fairfield [University], Georgetown [University] or Saint Joe’s, the Jesuit ideals of living for the greater glory of God can be found in each and every one of these university’s cultures.”

Lemanski said that he would definitely recommend that students continue to attend the conference in the future and hopes to attend the conference again.

“It gave me the opportunity to network with students from across the country and allowed me to immerse myself in the culture of another Jesuit school while having a fun time,” Lemanski said.

O’Brien said that if the resources were available, they would like to be able to send more students in the future.

“The JBSA kind of started from St. Joe’s so we want to see it continue and build, but also I want to see students get the opportunity to meet other Jesuit students from other universities,” O’Brien said.

Collins also said that she was looking forward to attending the conference again in the future because of how much she learned in her time there.

“I think it was more about the connections that we made within the different Jesuit schools, so now we all have contacts out in the Midwest and farther down south,” Collins said. “It helped us work under pressure and work really quickly and kind of forces us to work with people that we never even met before. You just have to learn and work with different personalities. It introduced me to networking, which is a skill that I’m definitely going to need in the next couple of years.”

Next year’s conference will be held at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Charley Rekstis, ’20, Assistant News Editor, contributed interviews to this story.