Niles North’s DECA students recently headed to Decatur, IL to compete in this year’s state meet from March 7-9, 2013. DECA is an international organization for students interested in marketing, management, merchandising, accounting and entrepreneurship.

The state meet starts off with an opening ceremony that honors students and their projects that have done community service work. Three groups from North received this mention. Students then take an economics test to assess their general knowledge of business.

The competition continues the next day with another test, specific to the area of business the student’s project correlates to.

The meet finishes on the third day with a series of role plays where the students are given a business scenario and have to come up with a solution which they will then pitch to the judges and be scored on how effective it would be if it were to actually happen.

Afterwards, the students give an oral presentation on their project to the judges. A paper is also written beforehand for the judges to read. Both the presentation and the paper are scored, and the students with the highest scores in their category have the opportunity to move on to nationals.

This year, four projects done by North students qualified for DECA’s national competition, ICDC (International Career Development Conference), which takes place this April in California. In the Buying Merchandising Operations Research Event, seniors April Hernandez, Reena Patel and Regina Roberg did their project on Bughouse Studio; in the Public Relations Project, senior Shazil Lakhani and junior Annie Modi worked on a project for the Danny Did Foundation; in the Community Service Project, sophomore Med Jimenez and senior Sarah Toy did their project on the Epilepsy Foundation of Chicago and Beyond Green Recycling; and in the Financial Literacy Promotion Project, senior Elif Gundogdu did her project on High School Heroes.

“We’ve raised almost $1000 for two amazing organizations and I couldn’t be happier that our project will be going to ICDC,” Jimenez said. “It gives us the opportunity to further our devotion to such great causes as the Epilepsy Foundation of Chicago and our school’s recycling.”

The following students placed in the state’s top ten:

Junior Sam Eisenberg in Business Services; junior Carlos Santos in the Business Finance Series; senior Samantha Youseph in the Business Operations Research Event; and junior Jazib Gohar along with Eisenberg and Santos in the Learn & Earn Project for DECAdent Delights.

DECA sponsor Mary Nagelvoort is extremely proud of all the students. “They all did wonderful projects and California couldn’t be a better place to go from here.”