The Monroe College two-year SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise) team achieved national ranking in the May 23-25 SIFE U.S. Year 2004 National Exposition hosted by the Kansas City, Mo. business community and presented by the Radio Shack SIFE USA National Champion Awards. Monroe’s twenty-eight member SIFE team finished in second-place in its individual grouping of five colleges and in the nation’s top half of the schools competing in the two-year league.

“This is really an outstanding achievement,” said faculty advisor Professor Max Torres. “It’s the result of hard work, dedication to community involvement, and the students’ understanding of how to apply their considerable business acumen to real-world situations.”  In the national SIFE competition, teams are judged during a 24-minute presentation and are evaluated on creativity and innovation, results of educational programs, and application of principles of free enterprise. The Monroe SIFE team’s presentation consisted of six different projects they had worked on. In each, they used their training in business management and marketing to better their community.

“The real bottom line for us is to help our communities and we’ve done that,” said Monroe SIFE President Sherman Browne, a Business Management major. “But we couldn’t be more enthusiastic about the experience of competing. It was like the Super Bowl of academics.”