For all of the thousands of hours of study that it takes to become an engineer, computer scientist, business executive or attorney, there’s very little professional preparation that can compare to hands-on experience.
That was the driving theme behind a recent competitive event, called the Technology and Entrepreneurship Achievement Competition, which Broadcom co-sponsored alongside four different graduate schools at the University of California, Irvine.
View photos from the event on Facebook.
“The cross-disciplinary approach to problem-solving mimicked what students will face out in the professional world. It’s also something they get little chance to practice while enrolled in intensive graduate programs,” said Vithya Krishnakumar, a graduate of UCI’s Law School and staff attorney at Broadcom.
“On my first day at Broadcom, I was on the phone with an engineer, a finance person, and a whole team of people who were not lawyers,” she said. “At times, it felt like everyone was speaking a different language. In grad school, it’s easy to get buried in the limited perspective of your specialty, but when you go into a real job, working with colleagues across departments is the first thing you are expected to do.”
The competition brought together inter-disciplinary teams of five students each, comprised of some 60 students from the UCI School of Law, the Paul Merage School of Business, the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and Henry Samueli School of Engineering.
Their task: Negotiate a term sheet for a business deal involving 3-D printing technology. Half the teams represented a company that manufactures 3-D printers and the other half represented a company that holds valuable intellectual property for a 3-D printing process.
Participants were given a specific role – unknown to other teammates until they sat down at the proverbial roundtable – that created some “internal tension” among the group, according to Monica Awadalla, director and managing counsel at Broadcom.
“Each role had different motivations and backgrounds related to their areas of study, and they had to work together to balance those interests and find a way to create value and move forward with a deal,” she said.
For example, the law students might be concerned with liability, while a business student would look carefully at the revenue structure, and the engineering types might push for development milestones related to the new technology.
The students began their day attending a “best practices” panel which featured frank advice and “war stories” from a seasoned, cross-discipline cohort of executives from Broadcom. The panelists included Richard Nelson, senior vice president of Marketing for Broadcom’s Broadband and Connectivity Group, Matthew Sant, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Broadcom, Kourosh Kohanteb, Vice President of Finance at Broadcom and Ed Tackett, Director for The RapidTech Center at UCI’s engineering school.
Once negotiations were underway, teams were evaluated on their professionalism, understanding of the issue at hand, effectiveness in achieving the goals set out by their clients, and their creative approaches to problem-solving, among other criteria. Competing teams were also evaluated on the final term sheets that roughly outlined their business deals, which could be structured as anything from a license agreement, to a joint venture or acquisition.
The importance of inclusivity for differing viewpoints among professional disciplines was further underscored by Art Chong, executive vice president, general counsel and secretary at Broadcom, who offered up some practical advice in a keynote speech at the post-competition awards ceremony.
Chong spoke to the students about the importance of going outside of their comfort zones and how their abilities to learn, problem-solve and collaborate are qualities necessary to thrive in the industries and jobs of the future.
“As students, you are tasked with the responsibility to be prepared to work with technologies that don’t exist yet,” he said to a crowd of more than 100 at UCI’s University Club. “That’s not what you’ll learn in school, but that will make you successful.”
The inaugural competition is hoping to grow into an annual event and to expand into other University of California campuses in the future.
