Business Professionals of America students left for Dallas on Wednesday to compete in their state competition Thursday through Saturday.

“I expect to mainly just get a lot of experience about the environment there and how people usually approach this kind of competition because this is something new to me even though it’s been a few years since the first time doing BPA,” senior Amer Jusupovic said. “Of course the goal is to get to nationals so that we can place there and see how we do against other people who came from other states of America.”

Candidate speeches and the campaign rally will be held at the state leadership conference Thursday.

“A lot of late nights studying and preparing for our presentation and just plenty of research on different topics that I wasn’t familiar with or didn’t know,” Jusupovic said. “Generally just getting together with other people and putting our minds together to see the best solutions to a topic and kind of get the bigger picture of some of these things.”

The top students chosen to represent Texas will earn their shot at the national competition in May 2019 at the National Leadership Conference in Anaheim, CA.

“I expect to do well, obviously, and really want to advance to the national competition and I need to get that top five spot,” sophomore Srujan Mupparapu said. “Since I wasn’t in the school curriculum, I self-learned it using a textbook and I also did practice test and good reference material.”