FATHER OF JSEC. Acting Loyola Schools Vice President Rudy Ang was one of the co-founders of the John Gokongwei School of Management Student Enterprise Center. PHOTO BY RYAN Y. RACCA

AN OFFICIAL panel of judges for the John Gokongwei School of Management (JGSOM) Student Enterprise Center (JSEC) Challenge has been created.

This is in response to Acting Loyola Schools (LS) Vice President and former JGSOM Dean Rudy Ang’s departure from the LS.

He is set to become the dean of the Ateneo Graduate School of Business next school year.

Ang is one of the main founders of JSEC, an experiential learning laboratory established in 2006 that allows Atenean students to run their own businesses for a year.

The JSEC Challenge is a competition in three legs held among all students interested in putting up a business in JSEC. The contest is co-organized by the Ateneo Management Association.

The JSEC panel

According to Coordinator for Student Entrepreneurship Initiatives William Mallari, he and Acting JGSOM Dean Darwin Yu, PhD met to decide on the best course of action for future JSEC Challenges.

In previous JSEC Challenges, only Acting LS VP Ang and Mallari judged the business proposals submitted by applicants.

“[Mallari and] I used to read all of [the submissions], but this year, we’re expecting more than 300 such proposals,” Ang shared.

“At some point, you say, ‘Kaya pa ba ng dalawang tao lahat ‘yan?’ (Can two people still manage all that?)” he said.

To help Mallari evaluate the incoming JSEC Challenge applications, the two decided to create a panel of judges.

The new JSEC Challenge panel will be composed of six JGSOM faculty members split into three subgroups. Each subgroup of judges will be assigned a specific number of proposals to analyze.

However, Mallari will still be reading all of the proposals.

Once he and the panel are done reviewing all the business proposals, they will then rank all the applications.

Acting JGSOM Dean Yu said, “I think part of the reason for the shift to a committee is that we would require more minds and mouths to come up with a collective decision as to what will be the better business proposals.”

The new judging system will be implemented for the JSEC Challenge this year.

The panel will choose twenty-two food stalls. Nineteen will operate in the JSEC compound, while the other three will be based outside the new Rizal Library, the Manuel V. Pangilinan Center for Student Leadership (MVP) basement and the Matteo Ricci Study Hall balcony.

Ang will no longer be part of the judging process.

JSEC-worthy

However, Ang said that he fears a JSEC Challenge panel of judges will decrease the chances of worthy applications to get a stall on campus.

“My concern is that, with too many panelists all reading only subsets of the whole set, will we really have the best proposals?” he said.

However, two JSEC Challenge applicants think having the panel will make the judging system more objective.

“I think the [evaluation] process is better than before because the work of processing the large quantity of proposals would not be too overwhelming [for the judges],” said sophomore JSEC Challenge hopeful Sean Chung.

He added that there would be less bias involved. “By increasing the [number] of judges, personal preferences [on the part of the judges] would not have [a] huge impact [on] the decisions made,” Chung said.

Junior JSEC Challenge applicant Trixie Tan agreed.

“With this ‘blind audition,’ all participants would be assured that the accepted proposals won’t be [chosen] because of who you know and who you are but because of the potential that the panel sees in the submitted proposals,” she said.

For JGSOM Dean Yu, faculty members in the panel can also use the experience “to become better teachers.”

“Hopefully, for the members of the committee, [judging the competition] will enrich their understanding of assessment and the connection between what students write and what students [can] do,” he said.

“Learn business by doing business”

According to Ang, he originally envisioned JSEC as an opportunity that could be tied up with lessons learned in the classroom.

“We set up JSEC because our educational philosophy has always been, ‘The only way to learn how to do business is by actually doing business,’” he said.

“Chemistry students learn chemistry by going to the chemistry lab, business students should learn how to do business by going to an enterprise lab,” Ang added.

The first JSEC was originally composed of stalls with different businesses, not only food, located in the area between the MVP and the old Rizal Library.

Ang said that over time, those who set up non-food businesses in JSEC lost money while those who owned food business were profiting.

“At some point, no one was applying [for] anything except food businesses. It evolved into that. It wasn’t a conscious decision on our part,” he said.

He added that if a student today had a good proposal for a non-food business, he would approve it.

“There’s no decision not to allow non-food [proposals]. It’s just that everyone has been proposing food,” he said.

According to Ang, he is content leaving JSEC in its current state.

“I am very proud and happy with what we’ve done with JSEC but it’s also time to let go,” he said.

With reports from Mara D. Cepeda