On Feb. 7 the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) ventured to St. Louis University to compete at the District Leadership Conference. Summit had 34 students compete in 41 events and 25 of the events will advance to state in April.

Business teacher Laurie Philipp said that before districts she gave the students resources they could use to prepare for their events to be successful.

“Beforehand, we gave students scoring guides, and they were able to either study their topic, plan what they were going to say for their presentation, or look over a script and practice that way. They can also find examples online to help them,” Philipp said.

Junior Tejus Krishnan placed first at Districts in graphic design. He said for this event, he and his group worked on designing a logo and practicing their speech multiple times to prepare, and they plan to do the same before moving on to State.

“For graphic design me and [juniors] Samuel Scheer and Lucas Faulkner made a logo and we did a lot of mock presentations to prepare. For State, we don’t plan on changing much because it looked pretty good so we were going to go with what we had,” Krishnan said.

President of FBLA senior Ryan Kline said at his event for Districts he was given limited time to prepare and then speak in front of judges. He was also given the opportunity to speak at the closing session before awards, which he said helped to boost his confidence.

“For Districts, I did banking and financial systems and I got 20 minutes to prepare for my competition. Then I spoke to three judges about what the solution was to their issue, which was based on investments. I also got to speak for the closing session which was pretty cool, so I got over my fear of public speaking especially because I didn’t know the speech well,” Kline said.

In preparation for state, Philipp said that many students won’t make many changes to their presentations but they will use the comments from judges to help improve their event before competing again.

“A lot of students will present the exact same presentation that they did at districts, at state, some of them want to be able to get feedback from judges and then make changes to their events as they want to before the state competition,” Philipp said.