Humber College’s OCMC team celebrates its sixth place at the annual marketing competition.
courtesy christian reilly

Ontario’s best and most motivated business students competed for medals and glory at the 2007 Ontario College’s Marketing Competition (OCMC) held by Fanshawe College November 15th and 16th.
 Humber took home to gold medals, one bronze and placed sixth overall.
This is the third year the Humber team has participated, but it’s the first time its placed in the events.
 “It’s the first time we scored any kind of significant amount of points,” said Robert Bolf, business management coordinator and a coach on the Humber OCMC team. “Afterwards we realized if we had gotten one more second place position we would have been second or third so the gap between first and sixth wasn’t that great.”
The OCMC consisted of different events including case studies, a job interview, a sales presentation, and a Quiz Bowl where students from different colleges were placed on teams to answer business related questions.
Second-year business management student Christian Reilly won the gold medal for his sales presentation and was offered a job at InfoTech Research Group by company executives judging the event.
“Later on that evening when everybody was at the bar, the president came over and tapped him on the shoulder and said ‘we were so impressed, how would you like to work for us?’” Bolf said. “As far as I know that’s never happened before.”
“I was very nervous,” Reilly said. “There were two big guys, the CEO and the CIO of the company and when I saw them on the list of judges that I had to present to, my nervous level skyrocketed.”
He said his teammates and teachers deserve as much credit as he does for winning the gold.
“It’s not just a personal accomplishment,” Reilly said. “It’s really a team accomplishment. This win was a win for Humber. Just having that spirit and that motivation and that support from everybody makes it an incredible experience.”
Humber students also won gold and bronze medals in the Quiz Bowl.  
 “We had a student on the first-place team, we had a student on the third-place team and we had a student on the fourth-place team,” Bolf said. “So our people came in first, third and fourth out of the top four on the Quiz Bowl.”
Deepayan Sengupta, a second-year business administration student, was a member of the gold medal winning Quiz Bowl team.
“It was a much more rewarding experience than I had expected,” he said. “For two and a half months there were about 20-25 of us in one room studying together toward a common goal. We formed a real good bond, not only student bonds, but student-professor bonds.”