Kadison 5 - FBLA Competition

I’m sure you’ve heard of the club FBLA. It stands for Future Business Leaders of America, and it involves competing every December against other chapters in our region. My team decided to do a presentation (partly because that is what we’ve done the past two years), and only the top two teams make it to states and compete in Hershey. However, this year there were a lot of different issues that popped up.

Usually, we do our presentation sometime after the opening ceremony and find out where we placed during the closing ceremony. Unfortunately, Saucon Valley had a gun/bomb threat, so they were not able to attend the regional competition. This created a slew of problems; they now have more time to work on and perfect their presentations, and they also could have harder/easier judges. Any groups in an event where Saucon was supposed to compete have to wait for them to compete and get their results. I’m empathic towards Saucon Valley, as having that threat over their safety would be terrifying, but at the same time, I am irritated because I have to anxiously wait longer to find out how well my group did.

On a more positive note, I feel as though my group actually presented pretty well. We did not use any notecards or script this year, just the powerpoint and ourselves. We also practiced our presentation a lot more than prior years, which helped it run more smoothly. Our topic was Social Media Campaign, and our judges were two young women (they looked like they were still in college), so they already had a prior understanding of how the social media we chose worked. We only had a couple mishaps along the way. Our group presented first, which was stressful, but we also got the presentation and stress over with right away. However, this meant we had to wait forever for the computer and projector to boot up. According to Mr. Koser, our adviser, the setup is usually good to go, but a lot of things were rushed due to the concern of finishing before it began to snow.

Even though my group doesn’t know if we qualified or not, a lot of my friends who competed in tests earlier this month found out that they placed, which is really exciting. Hopefully, my team will place and will be able to go to Hershey with the rest of our friends, but as of right now, all we can do is wait.