CSC News

CSC Student Jackie Sherman and ECE Student Win National Sales Engineering Competition

Recently, CSC student Jackie Sherman (pictured at right) and ECE student Keerthana Prasad placed first in a National Sales Engineering Competition at the National Sales Engineering Conference (NSEC), which took place virtually over two weekends in October. At the conference, sales engineering students from across the nation came together to compete in a foundational technical sales competition. The NSEC, hosted by the National Society of Sales Engineers, also provided students with opportunities to hear from various keynote speakers, learn from workshops taught by professional sales engineers, and network with other students and professionals. 

“The competition was an opportunity that I figured would be great practice for me since I knew I’d be entering the profession full time after graduation, and it was an incredible networking event as well as pushed me to learn and adapt in a real-life scenario!”, said Sherman.

The competition itself consisted of three role-playing activities which required competitors to take the role of Sales Engineer at a given company and host a hypothetical meeting with potential clients. After interning with Cisco this past summer, Sherman came prepared to compete and learn more, “The format was sort of similar to the way I had done it at Cisco, but it challenged me!” 

Initially, Sherman and Prasad went into the competition with the mindset of having fun and just doing their best. Throughout the competition, they were mentored by Heather Sadler, a Sales Engineer at VMWare. After placing fourth after the first round of role-play, the pair was completely caught off guard and became even more driven to win. After the end of the final round, Sherman and Prasad found out they had won the competition. “It felt fantastic learning that we placed first out of the 54 total teams nationally participating...Winning proves to myself and others that I take my work seriously and I should not be brushed-off based on first impressions!”, said Sherman.

Prasad is a Senior in Electrical Engineering who has accepted a full-time offer at Caterpillar.  Sherman, a CSC Student Ambassador, is a Senior in Computer Science and is minoring in Business Entrepreneurship.  She has accepted a full-time offer at Cisco. 

In regards to her experience at the conference, Sherman said, “I am so proud of Keerthana and myself, and so grateful to Heather and the NSSE for hosting such an amazing conference. It was a fantastic experience and I can’t wait to take with me what I learned into my full-time role with Cisco next year.” 

~snyder~