Business Professionals of America attended a virtual Regional Leadership Conference on Saturday where 9 students qualified for the State Leadership Conference in March.  

“This year, the competition was done completely virtually,” senior, club president Srujan Mupparapu said via email. “Multiple virtual conference rooms were used to facilitate the competitive events, and other events had a single online submission for participation.” 

Different from the usual in-person conferences, regional advisors created a website for competition day where a proctor facilitated the event for all the members in the room.

“For my team event, we were placed in WebEx breakout rooms, downloaded the instructions from the site, and uploaded once we finished,” senior, treasurer Anica Lui said via email.

Each student picked one individual event, one team event, and as many open events as wanted. 

 “There are many topics tested such as business management, computer programming, finance, health administration, and other fields,” Mupparapu said. “Students compete by either submitting their digital work through a submission system for judging, or by competing in real-time in a virtual conference room with the other competitors and judges,”

Rather than having meetings in person, students recorded videos explaining the events and updating members on districts. 

It was a lot harder to organize and deliver information to members this year because it took time for the coordinators to shift everything to the website,” Lui said.

The state conference and national conference are most likely set to be virtual this year. 

“The team’s overall performance was great as a good portion of our members advanced to state,” Mupparapu said. “As a club, we won 25 awards in total, which is great.”