From March 5 to March 7, members of North’s Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) club competed in the DECA state competition. During the three-day event, there were exams, presentations, a banquet and the award ceremony. At state, North students had many successes, including sophomore Aarush Parikh, junior Alanna Gupta and senior Jiya Singh qualifying for the DECA Nationals tournament in Atlanta, Georgia this April by placing high enough in certain events.
DECA, a business-oriented club, contains many different contest topics that range from things like finance to sports. In addition, DECA consists of a variety of competition formats like written events, role-plays and more.
“[In DECA], students will work in either individual events or team events regarding various business-related topics,” said DECA co-adviser Mike Horn. “It could be anything from accounting and finance to business law to sports marketing and management.”
In terms of competition style, the two main categories are split into events based on student knowledge and events based on student performance.
“There [are] generally two sides to a competition,” said Horn. “One is the knowledge-based, which would be [students] testing over their content knowledge, [and then there is] performance-based, … in which [students] have to go before judges, they’re given scenarios and they have to problem-solve a solution to it and present it to a judge.”
To prepare for competitions like state, North’s DECA team has club meetings regularly throughout the school year, some of which include practices for students to get comfortable in competitive settings before the actual season. This year, North’s DECA team even hosted a practice contest to fully prepare.
“Through our meetings, we try to do some practice tests and practice role-plays,” said Gupta. “We had one event where we had the East team come to North, and we had a practice competition regional event.”
For North’s DECA officers, which includes Singh and Gupta, playing the role of judges for the practice contest also helped them understand what judges would be looking for to improve their own DECA performances.
After putting in a lot of preparation, qualifying for Nationals was a major achievement. Looking forward, students hope to meet different people at DECA tournaments, and both advisers and students in North’s DECA hope to grow the club and its success in future years.
“I look forward to getting to meet all kinds of different people from different countries and different states,” said Parikh. “I hope to greatly expand DECA’s presence at North.”
