Students use their marketing, business, innovation skills to create one-of-a-kind DECA project solution
Submitted
Throughout the past school year, Hamilton Southeastern High School seniors Eric Bedrosian, Alex Jurkovich, and Ajay Singh competed in the DECA competitive events program.
Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) is an association of marketing students that encourages the development of business and leadership skills through academic conferences and competitions. Each year, students can choose from one of many written or roleplay events. Written events include a business plan as well as a presentation to one or more judges, while the roleplay events give students a short amount of time to come up with solutions to a selected challenge on the day of competition. Both provide students with the necessary skills to compete for jobs in the current and future work environment. The program sees over 211,000 participants annually.
At the end of each competition season, students can earn a spot at the international level. This year, HSE sent 19 students to the International Career Development Conference (ICDC), with five receiving top honors for their work on written projects and roleplay scenarios. Included in this group was the team of Bedrosian, Jurkovich, and Singh, who competed in the Hospitality and Tourism Operations Research Event (HTOR).
Photo provided
Bedrosian, Jurkovich, and Singh formed their DECA team over a year ago at the height of the pandemic. They previously competed in Destination Imagination (DI), a problem-solving challenge program, where they received national accolades for their project solutions between 2015 and 2020. In 2020, the group left DI to form their DECA team and to compete in the HTOR category. In 2021, the group received second place at the State Career Development Conference (SCDC) and competed in the preliminary rounds at the international level.
This year, however, the team set out with the goal to win the first-place spot at the international conference. Bedrosian knew it would be their last year together and he believed it was important to leave a mark on the DECA program before leaving HSE.
“We were on our last year as a group,” Bedrosian mentioned. “We needed to work hard and efficiently to get ourselves on stage. We had meetings for hours on end to get the project submitted on time, but in the end, it was well worth the wait to represent our school at the international level.”
This season’s competition asked students to work with an existing business to improve its employees’ experience and boost morale. Bedrosian, Jurkovich, and Singh reached out to a franchised location of Rusty Taco in Lafayette to help with this. The team developed a five-point marketing and improvement strategy, along with a prototype of an internal personality testing interface that would help boost employee morale and increase the employee pool at the location.
Eric Bedrosian simply can’t contain his excitement when his team won at the DECA international conference. Teammate Ajay Singh looks on. (Photo provided)
“We simply took what was being used for upper management and made it accessible to all. Everyone should have a chance at developing their career, and our new application allows their employees to do so.”
As a result of their hard work, the team placed first at SCDC and moved onto ICDC. In the end, the plan and presentation received high marks from the judges and placed them first internationally. Being an ICDC winner is a big deal in the DECA community, and Jurkovich was happy to see their hard work turn into first place,
“Being an international winner makes you cry,” Jurkovich said. “You get a great sense of euphoria as you are able to win something not only for your school and state, but for your country.”
HSE DECA has been headed by Kristin Lidstrom since day one. As a result of the work between the team and Lidstrom, HSE earned its first top 3 finish in the program’s 17-year history.
In addition to the first-place win by the HTOR team, Junior Suhita Chintalacharuvu received top 10 for the Human Resources Management event and senior Anish Kambhampati placed top 15 in the Human Resources Management event.
As for the DECA Glass? It now stands tall in the front office of HSE High School as a reminder that with hard work comes a great end result.