School of Business Students Receive Undergraduate Excellence Award

Curious people do research. Curiosity is what drives us to learn, to discover, and to interact with our environment.

The University’s annual Undergraduate Research Excellence (URE) Awards acknowledges a small handful of curious students with research awards totally over $24,000 this year. These students were nominated by their faculty supervisors for extraordinary research work, either as part of the UFV work study program, as research assistants, or for an outstanding research project as part of a course.

The UFV School of Business is proud to celebrate with Trisha Bugra, Ashreet Dhiman, Thanh Nguyen, and Steven Perry for receiving an award ($250 each) for their research on, “The Truth About Fast Fashion”. Their faculty supervisor was David Dobson.

Their research study was on “fast fashion”, the practice of mass-producing inexpensive clothing to help keep up with the latest trends. Fast fashion companies rely on efficient supply chain management, outsourced labour, and a copious amount of resources. However, there are several global consequences including unethical labour, water pollution, and excessive waste. From their results, it appears that consumers are regularly purchasing clothes from fast fashion retailers, but almost one in every three consumers are unaware of these consequences. Purchasers prefer buying from this industry for the trade-off between quality and price, without knowing the humanitarian and environmental impacts. They found that people are not willing to go out of the way to purchase ethically sourced clothing. Therefore, raising awareness on fast fashion would be the optimal solution to decrease it.

Due to Covid-19 and to ensure the safety of our students and faculty, the URE Awards were held digitally.

See the video acknowledging all the student winners here.

Find the full program for the 2020 URE Awards here.