Fogarty Awards

4. Having followed this program for many years, and was a winner myself when I was a graduate student, I can say that the quality has definitely deteriorated over the years. We spoke to a number of the judges on the competition and they are definitely in agreement.

5. Many of the schools we contacted tell us that their students now work on cases or company projects, but not research papers.

Based on all this information, we decided to rethink the program and see what we could come up with that might have more value. We believe that the students that we reach through the scholars program become very committed to APICS and we need to find more ways to reach out to students. We also believe that we need to increase the involvement of academicians if we want to reach students. It is not about the cost of the program, but whether it was accomplishing our goal of engaging more students and academicians in APICS.

We decided to replace the paper competition with a student leadership forum. The new forum will bring together a number of student/professor pairs to meet with corporate representatives to discuss education and knowledge requirements for the workplace. The forum will be a facilitated, two-way discussion with a deliverable summarizing the requirements to be shared with corporations, students and colleges and universities. The student leadership forum seemed a good way to foster a dialogue between students, academicians, and corporate representatives. We anticipate a call to students and professors for participant applications in September and a meeting in November in Chicago. Student/professor pairs will be selected using an application process.

The E&R Foundation led a Supply Chain Management 2010 study in 2006/2007 that resulted in a half dozen issues that corporations are most concerned about for the future. One of those gaps revolved around bringing qualified people into the workplace and the education these people required. We believe the student leadership forum will help fill this need.

The E&R Foundation is still working out the details of the new program and will make announcements as they are firmed up.

If your chapters and/or districts would like to continue holding student paper competitions at the local level, please do so. If you have an active student chapter, we encourage it. However, the difference for you will be that you will not pass on district winners (if your district participates) to the foundation.

We are certainly be open to comments and suggestions.

Rhonda Lummus
Chair APICS E&R Board

Bob Collins

Executive Director, E&R Foundation

Note, Mr. Collins can be reached for comments at bcollins@apics.org