From June 22 to June 25, four Ashland University students participated in the 2025 Institute for Management Accountants (IMA) Accounting and Finance Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The team consisted of two undergraduate students, Dmytro Solomianiuk and Max Vesper, and two graduate students, Joshua Hagan and Hilary Wallace.
IMA holds the global conference annually in June. It brings in people interested in the field of managerial accounting not only from across the country, but from all around the world.
The conference begins with the student case competition. The participating groups developed a cost-benefit analysis for NBA player acquisition. The project begins in the fall and allows students to work through the spring semester to submit their entry.
“We had to pick one of the 30 NBA teams, and they gave us a data set based on all of their performance statistics and their salary, and our task was to find between one and three players that would impact the team’s performance the most at the lowest cost,” said Hagan.
The four students selected the Minnesota Timberwolves and began to prepare in January.
“We were essentially tasked to find players that nobody else sees value in and draft into this team, where you can draft a maximum of three,” said Wallace.
“We made a program, like an algorithm, that helped us to define this combination, and this algorithm gave us the combination of threes, and then we selected the best combination,” explained Solomianiuk.
The group then proposed to acquire those players and provide a detailed explanation on how financially they can benefit the team.
Wallace explained, “So where are the diamonds in the rough players? What are the players that have high statistics, but won’t break the bank?”
Their work and effort paid off when they were selected as finalists in the competition and were invited to present their case in Arizona.
“We’ve been working and practicing our presentation on average two or three nights a week for a couple hours each night,” said Hagan.
In the final, they competed against other schools such as Mercer University of Georgia, The University of Las Vegas and The City University of New York, Queens.
Not only have the AU students been successful in their work but have also gained some valuable experience in the process.
Vesper described the conference as “a great networking tool.” There were booths and tables that gave participants the opportunity to meet employers.
“I’ve been able to connect with a lot of faculty that are studying in managerial accounting, which is what I’ll study in, so it’s been great to make those network connections,” said Wallace, an incoming PhD student.