Portola Business Club held its annual Business Mini Conference on Sept. 28 in the Student Union. Unique to the previous mini conferences Portola High has hosted over the years, students outside of the school attended the conference. Irvine High, Northwood High and Martin Luther King High had students participate at the conference.
The event broke the record for number of students having attended the Mini Conference, with the event drawing in the participation of over 130 students throughout four different high schools. Parent volunteers also played a large role in this year’s conference, making it a unique event. Parents of students acted as judges for the event, and parent volunteers judged the roleplaying competition at the conference.
“It was great to see a lot of interest this year and also everything ran pretty smoothly,” DECA vice president and senior Harini Rameshbabu said. “It was well organized this year, I would say because we had a lot of help with judging.”
The event offered business students an opportunity to experience participating in business-related competitions. The conference was prepared by business teacher Katherine Dillion and business students.
At the conference, students participated in both testing and roleplaying competitions. All students participated in both competitions. Students were chosen for either testing or roleplaying in the first half of the event and a different competition they were not originally called for in the second half.
Students were called forth when it was their turn to participate in the assessment. The testing portion of the event was a multiple choice exam in which students would answer questions based on the fundamentals of business that they were studying in their classes, and the roleplay portion of the event allowed students time to prepare and present a case study to a panel of judges.
The content that students are studying in their Intro To Business and Entrepreneurship, Virtual Enterprise and Small Business Management classes helped prepare them for the conference competitions. Business student and sophomore Anusha Jauhri said that her Intro To Business and Entrepreneurship class helped her develop the skills needed for the mini conference.
“I learned the six functions of business, and I think that it’s gonna help me a lot, especially when I do my role play, because I can use the knowledge that I learned from my first unit in my pitch,” Jauhri said.
The Business Mini Conference prepares students for the California DECA Business Competition, which is a large-scale business conference for schools that promote community engagement, according to DECA.
“I think it’s really important for students to join this business elective because this allows them to gain skills like public speaking and overall creative thinking,” Rameshbabu said. “It allows them to think outside of the box while also being able to go out of their comfort zone and network and meet new people.”
Business students will prepare for a future DECA competition by acquiring more knowledge on the fundamentals of business to prepare them to compete, according to Jauhri. The California DECA Business conference will take place in Anaheim from April 27-30.
