The members of Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) are up and ready for competitions. This year, DECA will be going to Anaheim, California on April 27-30, 2024 for their International Career Development Conference (ICDC).
DECA is a club that teaches and prepares students to be business leaders in the real world by recreating real life situations that put students on the spot and encourage them to make their own informed decisions. Students in DECA study finance, marketing, business management, and hospitality, and they later compete in these topics.
At ICDC, WA commonly does the roleplay event, where they are given a business problem and have 10 minutes to prepare an answer for it. Then, they roleplay the situation out in front of the judges. This tests their ability to respond to the real life problem appropriately.
Last year, the club had four freshmen enter the international competition, though they did not win. They also have a large number of members and have 11 officers this year.
“DECA has been the biggest club at WA for a long time and the Westford Academy DECA chapter has been one of the biggest chapters in Massachusetts, for a couple of years,” a senior DECA member and captain, Rhythm Arora, said.
They have won and done well in multiple competitions with the hope to uphold this streak, and many senior members hope to get the DECA glass, an international prize this year.
“Westford Academy does very well year to year. We have a long history of success,” DECA club advisor Kathleen Lehan said.
In order to qualify for these competitions, DECA members had to test from Jan 2 to Jan 5, which makes up 1/3 of their competition score. The rest of the 2/3 score is based on their score in the actual competition.
Last year in competitions, DECA came back with three DECA glasses, the prize given to first, second, and third place from the ICDC. The WA champions for the ICDC were former seniors Kush Gami, Dedeep Surampudi, and Rohita Krishnakumar.
There were around 200 people participating in the competition worldwide. There were also four freshmen who had gotten into the internationals as well. Eesha Gowda, Haasini Sriraman, Sandeep Sivakumar, and Krish Parmar had managed to get into nationals in the roleplay event due to their performance in the SCDC (State Career Development Conference).
The goal this year for DECA is to have freshmen gain as much experience as possible by having them try to go to ICDC or just SCDC to help them get comfortable with competing. This also benefits the officers as they will develop more leadership skills.
“Something we’re looking to do this year, or we have done so far, is encourage the members to step outside just the possibility of doing a roleplay competition,” Lehan said. “It’s good to push themselves outside their comfort zone.”
There is a recurring goal as well, which is to have everyone do their best and win some competitions. There are other goals that also carry over from year to year, like gaining more members, having people in situations that put them outside their comfort zone, and readying future leaders and entrepreneurs.
“One thing that has been great so far this year is that we’ve seen a lot of initiative from the class of 2027. There are a ton of kids participating this year,” senior officer of the DECA club Mahitha Yerabothu said.
