University of Tulsa's SpectrumFX team burns bright with spirit of entrepreneurship

They earned first place in the graduate division and are on their way to Las Vegas to compete for $118,000 in awards against leading teams from Arkansas and Nevada in the 2012 Tri-State Donald W. Reynolds Cup.

“It was about a year ago that I first heard about Governor's Cup from Nate Garrett, another TU graduate who went all the way to Las Vegas,” SpectrumFX team member Amethyst Cavallaro said. “He was on a panel recruiting students to the University of Tulsa, and when he started talking about the Governor's Cup, I thought, how cool would that be to bring everything we've learned together,” she said.

Cavallaro decided then and there that the Governor's Cup was the way she wanted to cap her MBA.

“I wanted to take everything I learned from all of my classes and apply that to a real-life application,” she said.

Cavallaro and her teammates are all native Oklahomans and work full time, three of them at Williams in Tulsa and the fourth at Steel Service Oilfield Tubular in Tulsa.

“We have an eclectic team,” she said. “Jessica (Casper) has five years of financial analyst experience. John (Galbraith) is an electrical engineer earning his MBA. Kathryn (Junk) is a human Rolodex; her connections in Oklahoma and D.C. are so extensive. I have sales, marketing, presentation and branding experiences. If we could ever work together as a team again, we would do it at the drop of a hat. We've never worked on a team so cohesive and complementary. We have such a trust in each other.”