Connor 5: FBLA Regional Competition

I did it, people. I ventured out of my everyday life and did something fairly interesting this week. I spent the school day at Lehigh Carbon Community College for the FBLA Regional Competition. I've been working on my presentation for it for months and have been anticipating this day.

Originally, I had been signed up to compete alone in the graphic design event, however, after I nearly finished that project, I was told we could only send 2 teams instead of 3, so I got cut. Thankfully, I was adopted into a team doing Publication Design, which had a very similar project. I now worked with Hannah Long and John Nigohosian, in an event where we had to create publications (Click Here for Slide Show)  for a musical artist and present it to a panel of judges.

After all the prepping we did, we were definitely ready for the competition. We got to the college and were told we were entry #2, so we sat down and were ready to prepare everything for our event. Much to our surprise, they called our names to go first (Because 2 comes before 1?). That rattled us a little, but it didn't make a difference. I'm not one to have confidence, but I really wanted this win, and let me say, we NAILED it. Our presentation was honestly amazing.

After we went, we had to sit for 4 hours and wait for the winners to be called. Those were the longest and most nerve-wracking hours I've felt in a long time. We were feeling kinda confident, but since every person alive now has severe anxiety (Wonder why😒) we started to question ourselves and got really nervous.

After the long wait, they finally started calling names. They did all the tests first so we had time before we knew if we qualified to go to states. During this, one of the judges came over and told us we did really good. My teammates got so excited and started celebrating, but my mind shockingly went to the dark place and thought, she's being nice because we got dead last and she doesn't want to hurt our feelings. Then stupid me opened my mouth and said that out loud. Back to the anxiety.

Then the time came. Our event popped up on the screen. Nazareth Team 2 had made states. We were so excited. Then to make it better, they announced second place went to the other team on the board. I may or may not have let a, naughty, slip, but as usual, I really didn't care. We won 1st place in regionals and are going to Hershey in April to compete for states. To top it all off we got really cool medals and giant Hershey bars, so I'm definitely feeling accomplished.

The whole competition was a great experience and honestly the most fun I've had in a while. Now all I have to worry about is getting 400 dollars to pay for states, but since I'm writing this at work, I feel like I can manage. Now the real question is, should I pay 800 dollars to get the Antisocial Suite? The GoFundMe will be in my Instagram bio soon.