HSE Students on the Winning Team in McKinsey Business Diving Competition

Andrei Chiginev, Evgenia Deusheva, Mark Shchetinin and Dmitry Garbuzov

McKinsey Business Diving is one of the biggest business case solving competitions in Russia. This year it had 2700 student entries from 181 HEIs across the country. HSE students Evgenia Deusheva and Mark Shchetinin were on the winning team.

The students spent a month solving a business case - they created a strategy to launch a budget airline from the major international company AirFrance-KLM.

This year the participants were given special training before the competition. A course in St Petersburg taught team-work skills and leading Moscow HEIs held specialist lectures on the banking sector, air and space transport, smart city technology and retail trading. At each stage, the participants went to classes that, besides providing new knowledge, helped them make the work in the case championship as close to a real business project as possible.   

Seven teams from different Russian cities and universities got through to the final. The final presentations were assessed by AirFrance KLM’s commercial director for Russia and the CIS, Simon Skholte and McKinsey experts and partners. The strongest case was presented by the CaseFlow team — HSE students Evgenia Deusheva, fourth-year student of the bachelor's programme 'Advertising and Public Relations' and Mark Shchetinin, first-year student of the master's programme 'Corporate Finance' and Bauman Technical University students Dmitry Garbuzov and Andrei Chiginev. The jury remarked on the high standard of their preparation and qualified approach to solving the business case. The winners won certificates from the travel company and were invited for interviews with McKinsey, bypassing the usually compulsory entry test.

Evgenia and Mark have taken part in several contests like this ( the Google Business Case Competition and TIMES, for example) and have been very successful.

‘I first heard about Business Diving a year ago,’ explains Evgenia Deusheva, ‘but I didn’t think I’d enter the championship as it requires massive input and I was doubtful that I had the time for it. We worked two to three hours a day and all of our weekends on the case for a month, and I don’t regret it. It showed me the kind of skills and knowledge I need to get a job in consulting and what I need to study more. Our case was like a real one, we had a real life client with realistic problems, and significant legal and financial limitations. So it was a genuinely useful learning experience.’