Members of the Business Professionals of America club is heading to Reedy High School early Saturday morning to compete in their regional competition. With more than 90 categories to choose from, club members will be participating in a maximum of three events; one individual event, one team event, and one virtual event. 

According to club president Kapil Rampalli, with added preparation and communication from previous years’ competitions, students will have a better idea of what to expect this weekend and how they can prepare.

“From years past, I think we’ve been a little more communicative with members, and we’ve tried to prepare them as much as possible by giving them access to the past years’ practice tests from previous competitions on Google Classroom,” he said. “Since some of the event descriptions are a little vague, we hope that looking at previous tests will help students gain a better idea of what to expect this weekend.”

With all the preparation for the variety of events members will be competing in, Rampalli found that giving advice and help to the students was one of the bigger challenges as an officer.

“Because there are so many events, it’s really hard to give general advice for how students can do well during the competition,” Rampalli said. “We’ve tried to give general presentation and testing advice to alleviate this, but it is really difficult to try and help everyone with their events when the areas of study are vastly different.”

For club vice president Srujan Mupparapu, preparing their members for the variety of events to choose from became a major obstacle to overcome.

“The obstacles we faced when preparing members came from the large diversity of events. Since we had so many members this year, there were a lot of events we had to learn about so that members could be prepared,” Mupparapu said. “In addition to this, we started doing virtual events this year so we had to learn how to administer those to the students and register them for nationals.”

To get ready for Saturday’s competition, members used a variety of their own resources and their own research methods to learn more about their event. 

“I’ve prepared for this competition by studying principles of accounting for my solo event which is fundamental accounting and my team event which is the financial analyst team,” junior Anish Rudra said. “But I’d definitely say the biggest struggle is the level of specificity that is needed for each of the events.”