Beta Alpha Psi Wins Best Practices: Leadership at Regional Competition

A team from JMU’s Eta Delta Chapter of Beta Alpha Psi recently won first place in the leadership category of the Best Practices Competition at the Beta Alpha Psi Atlantic Coast regional meeting in Hartford, Ct.

Team members included Eta Delta Chapter president-elect Ameer Hasan, and current Eta Delta Chapter co-presidents Paul Fitzsimmons and Joan Hadeed. Beta Alpha Psi is an international honors organization for accounting, finance, and information systems students and professionals.

Sponsored by Deloitte, the Beta Alpha Psi Best Practices Competition challenges competing chapters to exemplify the spirit and purpose of Beta Alpha Psi through activities that encourage leadership, strategic planning, and collaboration.

Prior to the competition, competing chapters must plan and implement a project within their chapter that displays best practices in leadership, strategic planning, or collaboration. Teams must then deliver a formal 8-minute presentation describing the mission of the project and its impact. Teams are judged by professional partners of Beta Alpha Psi based on the merit of the project and the quality of the presentation. 

For their leadership project, JMU’s Eta Delta Chapter developed a leadership speaker series aimed at JMU students that included presentations by CEO of If You Will Lead, LLC. Doug Moran, PwC partner Jamie Grow, Principal at SC&H group Ross Litkenhous and McGladrey’s Regional Talent Acquisition Manager Jen Busse. The Eta Delta Chapter hopes to make this series an annual program as a way to give back to the JMU community and build leadership skills in student organizations across campus.

Co-President Paul Fitzsimmons explains, “The underlying goal for the project was to host an engaging speaker series that highlighted various aspects of leadership that we feel are critical to all students' personal and professional development and success. Our series targeted students outside of just Beta Alpha Psi, so after finalizing the four topics we were going to present on, we reached out to specific groups on campus that we felt would most benefit from the presentations.” 

JMU’s Eta Delta team will advance to the 2014 Annual Meeting Best Practices Competition this August in Atlanta, Ga., to compete against other regional winners.