Four students from the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University got a taste of what it’s like to share their research in a professional setting when they were able to present at the MBAA International annual conference earlier this month at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago.
CSB students Malia Michelfelder Tessum, Hannah Kauppinen and Hannah Roach presented their research comparing the U.S. healthcare system with that in India while SJU junior Henry Ryan presented his work on corporate sustainability and waste management.
“It went really well,” said Ryan, a global business leadership major with a minor in data analytics. “It was an amazing opportunity to network with professionals from around the country, as well as a chance to take skills I’ve learned in the classroom and apply them in a real-world setting.”
“It’s something I really haven’t had the chance to do before. I’m used to presenting in front of other students, but this was very different. This time, my audience was professionals who have been in the industry for decades. I was able to do a question-and-answer session afterward, and they provided me with a lot of great feedback.”
Tessum, Kauppinen and Roach were able to research their topic first-hand during the two weeks their Global Enterprise in India course spent in India in January.
“I’m a global business leadership major with a minor in global health, and I’ve always been interested in health care policy and just healthcare in general,” Tessum said. “That made this a great topic for me to work on.”
Tessum said her partners also really enjoyed their experience presenting at the conference.
“We got to meet so many of the people who were there in the days before we presented so we felt very comfortable,” she said. “Everyone asked great questions and that helped put us at ease. Honestly, I expected to be nervous, but I wasn’t at all.
“We had a lot of awesome opportunities to network and we were able to meet professors from all over the country who wanted to hear about our research and what we were doing as students. We also wrote a 30-page paper that went along with our presentation and we had a lot of people who came up afterward and asked us for it because they wanted to know more. That was a great feeling.”
Also at the conference, Kingshuk Mukherjee, the chair of the global business leadership department at CSB and SJU, and Srinivasan Prasanna, a visiting assistant professor in the department, were also honored with the 2025 Distinguished Research Award from the Association of International Business Research and Practice.
The award honored their work “Effect of AI Agents on International Business,” a project they worked on along with Jayanta Chakraborti of the GIBS Business School and Bhaswati Jana of the Radiant Institute of Skill Development.
“We’d just like to say thank you to MBAA International and the Editorial Board of Association of International Research and Practice for this distinguished research award,” Mukherjee said. “It’s a tremendous honor.”