Grace College 2023 business graduates Michael Williams and Wyatt St. John ranked first worldwide in the online Business Strategy Game. Photo Provided

WINONA LAKE — Two recent Grace College business graduates, Michael Williams and Wyatt St. John, ranked first worldwide in the online Business Strategy Game (BSG).

In the BSG, more than 3,000 teams from 200 schools are faced with a series of business decisions as they compete in a global market, according to a news release from Grace College.

The BSG is part of the senior seminar class mandatory for all business majors at Grace. The class requires students to participate in the game as individuals, prompting them to make nearly 40 business decisions on their own in competition with the other students in their class as well as students playing around the world.

“Giving each of the students their own company forces the students to look at the bigger picture of their companies instead of focusing on their areas of specialization,” said Dr. Rick Koontz, professor of information systems and instructor of the senior seminar course. “The goal of this exercise is to have students look at business both strategically and holistically.”

Williams and St. John are the first Grace students to achieve first-place status in the BSG competition globally.

Williams, a Polk City, Iowa, native who studied business management and earned his MBA at Grace, will begin working at Lloyd-Otto Agencies this summer, an insurance agency in Schaumburg, Ill. Williams found the game to be a fun challenge.

“The game helped me understand how many different things go into running a company and how much a single decision can affect other areas of the company,” said Williams.

St. John, a business administration graduate, agrees.

“Both the senior capstone class and the game taught me different ways to look at a business,” said St. John. “The game allowed me to see the inner workings of a company and to test different decisions within business.”

St. John landed a job at the U.S. Consolidated Farm Services Agency in Muncie, where he will serve as a county program technician. Due to the class, St. John feels equipped to make Christ known in the field of business.

“We learned a lot about the biblical side of business,” said St. John. “Professor Koontz did a phenomenal job teaching us how to make decisions that reflect Christ in our careers.”

To learn more about our School of Business at Grace, visit www.grace.edu/academics/undergraduate/academic-schools-departments/school-of-business/.