These past few weeks students jackson jankowski and tanner langdon have put in heaps of effort to get where they are, they competed and had the chase to go to finals for DECA, we wanted a closer look into what that inhaled for them, we asked them about their experiences in DECA but also what they got to do outside of it and their overall experiences, here’s what they had to say.
Jackson: “we kinda got to chill but we went to the aquarium and saw whale sharks and dolphin shows, that was pretty cool, we got to see them train dolphins as well and they had this sea lion show that was also kind of a gameshow, we went to the coke museum as well and they had an actual vault and the secret recipe was in there, obviously we couldn’t open it though. Basically we got in on saturday i believe and we had to go to opening ceremonies, they had swoozy(guest speaker) and he gave us a business oriented peptalk wich was interesting, the next day we didnt have to wake up every early, in the morning we took an exam wich asked us questions you should know if your going into business or DECA, the exam was worth ⅓ of our overall score, the next day we were given a case study with a fake scenario where we had to figure out the solution to the problem this was worth ⅔ of out score, we has to take 30 min to talk about our solution then 15 min to present the solution to the judge, after 45 min the judge evaluated us rating us 1 through 10 on our performance then another ⅙ on our 21st century skills. the overall score is out of 100, they took the exam score and they put it with our roleplay score, they judged us against 16 other teams and we ended up placing either 1st or 2nd in our flight wich means we could move onto finals along with the top other teams in the world, finals ment another roleplay ⅔ and the exam being ⅓ being separate from the other exams, we did not place top 10 at finals but we placed top 20 in the world, that was the competition”
Tanner: “We went to Atlanta for the international career development conference. This is DECA’s international competition. The first part of the competition is a 100 question test that accounts for ⅓ of your total score. We did the test and after that we did the preliminary competition and we became finalists. There were 160 ish teams, we were top 20 we met really nice people in the finals, it was stressful but we had fun because it was our last time competing in finals, it was also a lot less stressful for me because it was my last time doing a deca roleplay, I lived in the moment and enjoyed the experience.
We didn’t end up placing in the top 10 but were happy with how we did because most schools don’t have finalists, most people that we talked to have never had finalists before so we were pretty proud of ourselves There were about 30,000 people there, most people don’t make it to this level we are also the first in this school to make it this far so we are very satisfied.
. One of the things we did, when were in the beautiful city of atlanta georgia we went to the atlanta zoo it happened that when we went to the zoo which was the time the animals sleep, which you think would be boring but it was incredibly cute to see sleeping lions and other animals, on our way home from the zoo we went inside a waymo, it was freaky to be inside a car with no driver.
Deca provides an excellent opportunity to develop skills in the business world, develop connections, and network with people in various fields. But on a more fun note deca provides a lot of travel experience i wouldn’t otherwise have last year i got to go to orlando and the various theme parks, this year we got to spend short of a week in sunny atlanta georgia, DECA gives you the opportunity to experience new things you wouldn’t normally get, deca i a great opportunity for people who want to develop professional, creative, or leadership skills or people who want to miss school to travel and go to theme parks ;)”
We congratulate Jack and Tanner on their newly made history for Lamphere DECA, if you want an opportunity to get to do something like this, talk to Mr Sharrard for information on joining next year, again we are so proud of these two!
