2009 Virtual Case Study Video Winners

The judges have made their choices for the 2009 StudentAffairs.com 2009 Case Study Competition for graduate students. We would like to congratulate all 31 teams for participating in this year's competition of creating two 1-3 minute resident assistant training videos. Out of 62 entries, 14 videos were chosen as finalists. From this group, videos were awarded for Most Educational and Most Creative.

And the winners are...

EDUCATIONAL
1st -- Postcards (North Carolina State U.)
2nd -- FERPA (Oklahoma State)
3rd -- Sexual Assault (Indiana State)

CREATIVE
1st -- FERPA
2nd -- Captain Challenge (U. of Iowa)
3rd -- Diversity Update (U. of Central Arkansas)

He has done it again! Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point & Blink) has written: Outliers: The Story of Success.
In Outliers, Gladwell “…examines why some people become extraordinarily successful and others do not. Challenging the conventional notion of the self-made man, he argues that most great success stories spring from unique advantages and opportunities that enable remarkable achievement”. (Dan Lips for McCarthy Newspapers).

As an example of a unique advantage and opportunity is Bill Gates. In 1968 When Gates was attending an elite private high school near Seattle (advantage #1), the school started a computer club (advantage #2). Most colleges did not have a computer club in the 1960s! His interest in computer programming grew from there to the formation of a company called Microsoft.

The Beatles (John, Paul, George, & Ringo) had the unique opportunity to play for eight hours at a time in Hamburg Germany at a strip club. The opportunity they were given was not the pay, not the audience, but rather the amount of time (a lot of it!) they had to play together (the opportunity). The more they played together the more confident and the better they became (the advantage).

Join in the discussion of Gladwell’s premise that when you look at the lives of the highly successful, the idea that they’re self-made crumbles.

Click here to join the discussion.