Senior student and Hospitality Management major Tina Stangeland recently won second place in the national competition called the Pro-Sim Restaurant Management Challenge. Stangeland was required to take part in this competition for her Menu Design and Service Management class.

“We managed a [digital] restaurant…We had to help the restaurant with menu design and pricing, staffing, and inventory,” says Stangeland. The competition took place over a simulated year and the student’s cumulative profit was posted to a public scoreboard so they could see where they ranked among students from over 50 different college and universities.

“The biggest challenge for me was finding a good combination of staff to menu prices. Your goal was to pretty much run the simulation for a week at a time to see how different changes you made affected your profit,” she says. “The first couple days of the challenge my weekly profit was only about $19,000 by the end of the competition I was getting weekly profits of about $31,000-34,000.”

So how does this competition help Stangeland? In addition to a cash prize of $500, Stangeland says she’s been contacted my several large corporations that would like to parlay with her. She can’t wait to put it on her resume and use it in running her own restaurant someday.