DECA has been a part of Francis Howell North for a very long time, as the program grows, more and more students qualify for higher-up competitions. In this club marketing students focus on building teamwork and unity through learning how to be professional with a team and on their own in real-world business situations. In order to experience this, a big part of the overall learning experience is participating in competitions and events. 

“The competitions are gonna usually be really busy,” Laila Dowdy, a senior and DECA club president said. “Not only are we going to be competing but we’re also going to be taking tests and then just going through different parts of the conference that are, guest speakers, or just like fun events.” 

In a usual competition, they have categories such as finance, hospitality, hospital hospitality and tourism marketing, and business management and administration. With those, you can get assigned to do individual or team events which then go down to more categories such as roleplay or written events. 

“If it’s a role-play event where they’re speaking, there’s performance indicators that students need to hit up on,” DECA Supervisor and Marketing teacher Mike Freedline said about the criteria judges use to score events. “They get different point values for making sure they cover those plus their overall objective for the role-play, then for the written events, there’s also guidelines that go with it.”

Then after being scored and making it through the rest of the competition depending on how you do you may get the chance to move on to other bigger competitions like districts in December, state in March and internationals in April. Through these competitions you are able to improve your public speaking, collaborative, and overall expressive skills. All that and being able to meet new people. 

“The people who are in DECA are wonderful people.” Dowdy said “They’re very intelligent and they’re some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And it feels good to surround yourself with people who have common goals, like they want to do the same things as you.”