For the first time in a while, I thought for my blog this week I’d actually consider turning it in on time for once (yeah well that didn’t happen). Right now (Thursday evening), I’m over in Rosemont by the Ohare Airport for the Illinois DECA State Competition. I somehow managed to qualify for the State competition after placing 1st in the Entrepreneurship Individual Series event over at the Sectionals competition a few weeks ago. For my blog this week, I thought it might be interesting to do a hotel tour since this is the first of three days that we’re going to be staying here.

I’m bunking with the legendary Daniel Wang, the incredible Shan Gupta, and the great Alec Zhang. We have a bit of a balcony just overlooking the highway and a little bit of the airport itself. Decent little view but not as great as the full length window wall from my room last year.

Speaking of last year, I remember a group of us kids from North met up with some random people from Bartlett highschool and held a giant relay race in the main hotel area on the 10th floor. The hotel itself is designed in a giant square with a track that wraps around making it a perfect track course.

Edit: It is now Friday and yesterday night became super busy very quickly. After getting into our rooms and settling in, the vast majority of us just started working on homework and unpacking. We eventually got our event schedules at roughly 3:00 pm which is when I found out that my event was one of the very few that was having its cluster exam that same first night. Before then, however, while everyone else had started exploring the hotel, me and one of my other friends sat down in one room and started to go through previous cluster exams and old questions in order to prepare for the test we both were going to have to take that same night.

 

At the testing room itself, I met a few new people from different highschools throughout Illinois, partly because we were all crammed into a tiny room and we were all sitting like one foot apart from each other. Me and Thomas (my sophomore friend who’s the only other kid from North in the same event as me and is my dedicated study buddy) both thought that we did alright after we finished everything. We went over some questions and I realized that I had made a really dumb mistake on one of the calculation questions because I was rushing through the test way too fast. Apparently 5/2 is actually equal to 2.5 and not 1.5. Overall, however, I still felt confident we did well because our last-minute review session went over at least ten of the same questions that were on our cluster exam.

 

After our cluster exam, we had a giant assembly with all of the DECA students to essentially kick off the competition even though by then I had already finished a third of what would accumulate to my overall score in my event. Once that was over, it had already gotten pretty late so everyone essentially went to bed as the DECA people set in the curfew and ushered people into their rooms. After curfew though, me and Alec ended up staying up late and watching this bum movie with Adam Sandler called The Do-Over. That was definitely a solid 10/10, would highly recommend.

 

Anyway, today morning (Friday) I got my two roleplays done and out of the way. My first roleplay was about this weird Ornamental company, which I honestly don’t remember much about. I just know that it was probably the worst professional roleplay I’ve had to do partly because the event coordinators didn’t give any time warning like they normally do. By the time we had to head over to our assigned judge, I had only prepared for two out of my five performance indicators and I didn’t have any drawn creative element prepared either. I had to come up with a lot of stuff on the spot and I honestly don’t think my improvisation skills made up for my lack of prep materials. My second roleplay was the complete opposite. I think that was the best roleplay I’ve ever done in my entire life. It was about wanting to expand the services we provide as a salon where employees travel directly to the customer and it required me to analyze the different market strategies we would need to use to reach our target audience. For that, I went through all the performance indicators like normal but then I also used two different visual elements to recommend expanding our services through three different avenues. One of my media pieces was a pros and cons table comparing if we were to prioritize employee training just for men’s grooming vs women’s grooming. Then for the other visual, I had a drawing of what our app could look like so that customers could directly interact with hairstylists and whatnot through that and we could essentially just become a company like Uber or Lyft where we would charter out professional services while limiting the liability we take on.

 

Hopefully I place well, but it kind of all depends on how badly I did on my first roleplay since I think I did good on everything else. Right now I’m chilling with the one and only pandaman, Jacob Pandya, and with the fishy guy, Vish Yelamanchili. I’m in their room right now eating Panda Express while playing NBA2K, Madden, and Fortnite along with the king, Ian King, the possible D1 athlete, Tommy Morrison, and the big man himself, Joe Hinsberger. Vish brought his Xbox just like last year so we’re all kind of just cramming into his and Jacob’s room. Meanwhile, my room basically got raided by like everyone else from North and just became a giant Squid Games binge watching party. 

Edit2.0: Tis now the day of Saturday and is the last day for DECA State for some of us. Yesterday night we also had a big banquet we had to go to where we got some pretty solid cheesecake and had a few good rounds of Uno. There was also a hypnotist assembly but the majority of us ended up skipping that. 

Late last night I actually stuck around in my room and spoiled Squid Games for myself by only watching the last episode, but honestly, I don’t really care anymore because I’ve already heard so many spoilers from other people at this point that I pretty much already know what happens for the entire series. We also ended up watching Kung Fu Panda 3 and I rediscovered how much of a fan I am of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic after a great discussion with the frizzy Izzy Chew about Twilight Sparkle, King Sombra, and the other characters in the MLP Cinematic Universe. To be completely honest, I kind of want to go back and rewatch the entire series one of these days when I get the chance.

 

Anyways though, today we had the main awards ceremony where they announced everyone who won raffle prizes and also who got into the top 10 for each event as well as who would be going to nationals based on who placed in the top 4. To get to the point, I, unfortunately, did not even place in the top 10, so yeah, I was definitely bummed out quite a bit because I actually really wanted to go to ICDC. As copium, I keep telling myself that it’s senior year so it’s not like I can put it on college apps anyway, but to be honest, this was the first time I really put effort into DECA and actually won something out of it, so I was very much so hoping to make it all the way especially since I came in 1st at Sectionals. It is what it is unfortunately.

 

LASTEdit: Well now I’m writing this almost two weeks later because I didn’t submit earlier, but I just got back my full results from the competition and apparently I placed 11th overall. I got a 79/100 on the cluster exam and placed 5th out of everyone on that. Then I got a 77/100 on my first roleplay and 88/100 on my second one. It really was that first roleplay that ended up killing my overall score. That makes me feel a little bit better, but DECA State was still fun regardless of how I did in the competition itself. This was my second year competing at State and I truly had a lot of fun in the two years I got to fool around with a bunch of friends in a giant hotel.