On Friday, March 10th, the Ward Melville DECA team competed in Rochester, New York at the New York State DECA competition. Twenty-five Patriot DECA members competed at states. Eight students, Jay Sangwan, Varsha Talanki, Priya Mukhi, Kelsey Ge, Josh Farahzad, Will Jin, Austin Day, and Tyler Flynn, placed top five and have qualified for the national DECA competition.

DECA stands for “Distributive Education Clubs of America.” It is an international association of high school and college students and teachers. It emphasizes the development students’ managing and entrepreneurship skills in the fields of business, marketing, finance, and hospitality. Students from all around the world compete in regional, state, and national competitions in hopes of qualifying for internationals. This was Ward Melville’s first year of participating in DECA.

Students competing in DECA were each assigned a general category of management, as well as a specific event related to their category. For example, if a student were assigned the category hospitality, their event could be “Quick Serve Restaurant Management” (a specific topic that falls under the realm of hospitality). For the state competition, the students had to take a test on their general topic and then participate in a role-playing event for their specific topic. The test was 100 multiple choice questions and was designed to gauge students’ understanding of their category comprehensively. For role-playing event, students were given a management problem scenario where they had to assume the role of an individual in the situation, such as manager or employee of the business, and would present their solution to the problem to a judge. The judge scored the students based on their ability to explain their ideas, as well the creativeness of their presented solution. This event aimed to assess students’ ability to apply the information they had been tested on for their exam in a real-world scenario. After the students had completed both components of the competition, their scores were averaged, and then ranked overall. The students who ranked top five qualified for nationals.

Ward Melville’s eight qualifiers will be competing at nationals April 19-22 in Anaheim, California. Wish our management experts good luck!