UA students Egypt-bound to share tips

Real-life missions have sent University of Arizona retail students to eegee's restaurants, the UA Bookstore and a business in Puebla, Mexico, to instill the basics of marketing and business plans. Now, four students at the UA Southwest Retail Center get to share what they learned with business students in Cairo, Egypt.

The UA Students in Free Enterprise team is the first university team invited to travel overseas by SIFE World Headquarters. SIFE builds partnerships between businesses and higher education by encouraging students to apply classroom learning to real-life business situations.

That's precisely the message the UA students will take to Cairo, said Edward Sullivan, UA SIFE's vice president of marketing.

"We really want to stress to them to be innovative, creative and inventive," Sullivan said. "Being creative and innovative really sets the pace. What is it people haven't seen and want to see? That's not necessarily what schools teach."

Seniors Amanda Zaluga and Amanda Davis and juniors James Tang-Mills and Juan Ciscomani will travel to Egypt from Feb. 7 to 15 to help establish SIFE teams at colleges there.

"It's a huge deal," said Melinda Burke, the retail center's director. "It says we are seen as an international model of SIFE teams."

SIFE is a nonprofit organization with 1,400 chapters at universities and colleges in 33 countries.

The UA SIFE team, about 100 strong, was the first runner-up this year in the SIFE national championships, and UA's Duel in the Desert, a financial case study competition this year, has spawned similar duels at other universities, all overseen by UA SIFE.

"There was no selection process (for Egypt) other than SIFE World Headquarters wanted the University of Arizona to go," Sullivan said.

Burke said the UA SIFE team's strength stems from building on what prior teams accomplished rather than starting from scratch each year. The team has built collaborations with other UA departments as well as businesses in the community.

"The whole point of SIFE is to develop leadership, teamwork and communication skills," Burke said.

Three years ago, SIFE members launched a Credit-Wise Cats team to provide credit counseling for college students. Credit-Wise Cats last March hosted a Duel in the Desert competition that was so popular that SIFE members are now writing case studies for "Duel in ..." competitions at Purdue University, the University of South Carolina, Texas A&M and Colorado State University.

Because several SIFE members, most of them retail and consumer science majors, have ties with Mexico, the team researched the country and found a company in Puebla that now gets student help with business and marketing plans.

"We're working with eegee's and the UA Bookstore, the same thing we're doing with Mexico," Sullivan said.

The Egypt trip was funded by a special grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the U.S. Department of State. SIFE World Headquarters officials will be in Tucson on Jan. 28 to give the SIFE team a two-hour orientation about the Egypt project.

That same day, University of Sonora faculty members will be in Tucson to get a firsthand look at UA SIFE's planning process for a major project. The Mexican university also wants to start a SIFE team.