More than a dozen Redhawks traveled to Atlanta last week for DECA’s international competition, with one team securing the highest placement in school history.
DECA’s International Career Development Conference (ICDC) is an annual event with over 26,000 students, advisors, and business professionals in attendance, where high school students compete in 60+ events for the chance to place in the top three and receive DECA glass.
For the Redhawks, this was a record-breaking year with juniors Rayanne Noonari, Nithilan Karthik, and Ish Aggarwal securing second place as a team in the Career Development event.
“The experience feels very surreal,” Noonari said. “To win glass is like a big thing. The hard work that we put in and how that hard work really paid off.”
For Karthik, taking second place at ICDC was an experience made possible by the hard work the team had put in.
“There’s so much stuff that could go wrong outside of your control,” Karthik said. “So I’m just grateful to external factors like other people, fate, god, luck, whatever you want to call it for, like allowing the hard work we put in to actually materialize into something great like that glass.”
But for Aggarwal, the road to DECA glass was one characterized by hard work and relentless preparation.
“Prepar[ing] for ICDC took a lot of effort,” Aggarwal said. “It included sleepless nights with my partners Rayanne and Nithilan. And honestly, sometimes at ICDC, there were times when my friends were having fun, but we had to stay back and prepare. And that’s why we ended up actually winning because of the preparation we put into it.”
This win can help set the stage for the school’s DECA chapter moving forward, according to advisor Demas Lamas.
“So last year we got glass, and it was the first time we got glass in the history of the chapter,” Lamas said. “So for another team to get glass, it’s like something more to be expected. And we’ve never gotten glass in a prepared event, the written events. So that’s a really big deal. So hopefully this opens the floodgates.”
