Two teams of Bulldogs managed to earn first place at the Virginia DECA State Leadership Conference (SLC) on March 1. Duo Bridget Byrne and Ishita Sharma earned the first place glass trophy in Sports and Entertainment Marketing and Sukhi Mahadevan, Rithika Kanakamedala, and Ved Bhandare also won first place in the Community Awareness Project category for their work with HerVoice.
In their first year competing for DECA, juniors Byrne and Sharma worked tirelessly to succeed in the most competitive event at the conference: the Team Decision Making section of Sports and Entertainment Marketing.
“We studied performance indicators incessantly to the point where role-playing became muscle memory,” Sharma said. “We found so many practice role-plays online that we would just do over and over again for days on end.”
After all of their hard work, Byrne and Sharma felt prepared to do the role-play and thrive in front of the judges.
“I was confident that I knew enough going into the role-play after so much preparation,” Byrne said. “Afterwards, I was super happy with our performance, so I felt confident in us placing even though there was so much competition.”
Bryne and Sharma were nervous about this new experience, but working as partners allowed both of them to rely on each other for help when they needed it.
“I am really glad that I did a team role-play because Bridget is really creative and has so many good ideas,” Sharma said. “If I don’t know something, she knows something, and if she doesn’t know something, I know it.”
The two are not stopping anytime soon, however. They are already beginning to prepare for the International Career Development Conference (ICDC) in Orlando, Florida this April, which will be even more competitive.
“Since ICDC is an international event, it is going to be even more challenging,” Sharma said. “We will have to learn about the markets and business aspects of other countries to be able to compete with the immense amount of people going to the international conference.”
Another team of juniors will be attending ICDC as well. Members of the HerVoice community project, Mahadevan, Kanakamedala, and Bhandare, were inspired to raise awareness for domestic violence when putting together this project.
“One thing that I would say made a huge impact is the passion for this project,” Kanakamedala said. “The amount of dedication we had, and knowing that this is our niche, allowed us to speak more passionately about it, which helped us understand and grasp the information easier so that we can explain it in our written and to the judges in a simpler way.”
After not placing at SLC’s the year prior, the trio made many improvements to their project to ensure their first place victory.
“We expanded HerVoice more out to the students, bringing our new lead, Ved, having more officers to help us with events, and making connections with different people to help us spread this awareness, which helped us compete better,” Kanakamedala said. “I wasn’t surprised that we placed, but I felt more joy that we were able to make a comeback after last year and exceed our expectations by placing first.”
The camaraderie between these three students is evident in the way they managed to come out of the weekend victorious.
“Being with partners like Ved and Rithika was amazing, simply because of how hardworking they are,” Mahadevan said. “Group projects aren’t always my favorite thing, so having partners with the same work ethic, dedication, and passion towards the domestic violence community was really refreshing.”
Overall, a common theme between all of the groups who placed first was their confidence that they would excel in the rankings at the end of the competition.
“I wasn’t surprised because me and my partners worked incredibly hard on HerVoice for the past year,” Mahadevan said. “And we were able to grow it exponentially, so we felt very prepared and it felt deserving.”
