WORTHINGTON -- Eight Worthington High School students competed at the state level last week at the Business Professionals of America's 2008 Minnesota State Leadership Conference, learning and applying business concepts.
"It's a really good opportunity," said junior Courtney Bradley, 16. "You learn a lot about yourself and people you compete with, and you get a lot of opportunities in the business world to meet new people."
BPA fosters leadership, academic and technological workplace-related skills in students and community leaders. Its conference and competition features a variety of contests such as insurance concepts, prepared speech, graphic design, programming and computer security.
Two WHS students -- David Bardan and He Chen -- have chosen to attend the national competition May 6-11 in Reno, Nev. Many of the others who qualified to attend opted out because it's too close to advanced placement testing, finals and graduation.
"I'm very proud of all my students," said BPA coach Penny Troe. "The kids did really well."
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Because the events are so different, they don't all share the same competition structure.
Ninth-grader Samantha Thuringer earned fifth place in the digital media category by creating a Power Point presentation and narrating it. Judges then asked her questions about her presentation, equipment and design choices.
Many other competitors chose to do commercials instead of slideshows, but Thuringer went with the more personal approach.
She didn't expect to earn fifth place -- it was her first time participating in BPA.
"I like how professional it is, how you get to dress up nicely," Thuringer said.
Bradley competed in insurance concepts and keyboarding production. She took a written test for insurance concepts and created business letters, memoranda and reports for keyboarding production. The reports were judged on formatting, spacing, accuracy and speed.
"I like typing, and I work at my mom's insurance office in the summer," Bradley explained. "I did type up a lot of business letters, and I thought it would be good to learn more about it."
Bradley, too, competed in BPA for the first time this year.
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Senior Karissa Phelps, in BPA for the second year, took third place in graphic design promotion at state, designing a flyer to promote the BPA's national leadership conference in Reno.
Her flyer's theme was "Invest in Your Future" and showed a piggy bank with pennies falling into it -- a fitting theme for BPA.
Phelps intends to major in graphic design in college. BPA has given her experience in the workforce, including interviewing, meeting deadlines and discussing her designs.
Chen, a sophomore, earned third place in JAVA programming at state and also participated in personal computer servicing and troubleshooting.
The programming contest included both a written test on concepts and a programming assignment. Chen learned programming mostly on his own after conducting research online.
"(BPA)'s challenging, and seeing other people scoring higher than me motivates me to do better," Chen said.
Troe agreed.
"It gives them self-confidence. It gives them a real experience of how to interview," she said of her students. "They get a chance to get out of Worthington and see the good and bad in the real world. The biggest thing I want to show them is what the real world has to offer."
