Parkway Central’s Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) team attended the state competition from April 14 to 16. 22 students competed in various events, and everyone placed in the top ten of their events. Besides that, five students qualified to compete nationally this summer in Orlando.
FBLA state’s competition is the next level tourney for the district qualifiers. FBLA President, Senior Devank Uppal, explained that state competition is more selective with a stricter grading scale than district competition.
“[The grading system is] the 70-30 rule. 30% is presentational, how you dress up, how you speak, and eye contact. The other seventy is all the technical stuff that we have,” Uppal said. “They can take off points if you don’t have the right dress code on.”
The competition offered a wide range of events. Freshman Deepashri Modekurty competed in two events at state: Intro to Marketing Concepts and Event Planning. The former event is an individual test-taking event, the latter is a half test and half in-person roleplay team event, which she did with freshman Tharun Piruthiviraj. Modekurty said she prepared both of the events outside of class time using online resources.
“There are lots of resources online, I found quizlets [to prepare for the testing event],” Modekurty said. “I tried to read up on the vocabulary they use to make us seem more professional.”
Freshman Jason Mathew, along with Uppal and sophomore Serena Huang, competed in mobile app design. They created a social media platform for high school students to connect with each other based on their interests. His team divided the app design into different sections to work on together.
“Serena is the main coder. I would make a code and then send that code to her [to] see if it works,” Mathew said. “Devank helped out with UI design, which is the logo you see in the app. All of us worked on the Canva presentation we had.”
Mathew believes Huang is crucial to their coding project. He said that Huang is the person that helped him the most in their event.
“She’s really good at coding things. She would edit [my code] so it works on the app platform,” Mathew said. “She knows how to fix every error in the code.”
After their preparation, the team headed to the three-day state competition in Springfield, MO. They spent the first two days competing and attended the award ceremony on the last day. Modekurty describes it to be a fun learning experience.
“When you weren’t competing, they had tons of workshops,” Modekurty said. “They had something called ‘College Expo’, where they had booths from colleges that had leadership activities and team building activities. So I got to meet new people, and make connections.”
During the awards ceremony, the top ten were called on stage and the competitor’s ranking would be announced from lowest to highest, with the top four teams qualifying for national. Modekurty’s event planning placed second and Mathew’s mobile app design placed first. The award is both exciting and anxious, according to Modekurty.
“It’s so nerve-racking. When they called the top ten and it got all the way up to second, and they said my name. It was just so surreal,” Modekurty said.
Overall, as FBLA president, Uppal said the team did very well this year at state.
“We were very shocked because we had some aspects that we thought we were really missing,” Uppal said. “It’s technically about being better than the other teams too. But we are at our best, so we were shocked and happy.”
Thinking broader than the competition, Modekurty said that FBLA helped her explore different aspects of professional life, which enriched her high school experience.
“[FBLA] opens up new doorways,” Modekurty said. “It really helps me build up confidence speaking and acting in a professional setting. I think having this is a really good opportunity.”
