The State Career Development Conference (SCDC), DECA’s annual statewide competition, brings together students from across Maryland to compete, network and showcase their business skills. This year’s competition took place Feb. 28 in a convention center in Baltimore. Though DECA is one of RM’s most popular and well-known clubs, many students don’t know how it works.
“DECA is a pre-professional club that allows young people to engage in case studies or artificial business scenarios,” senior and co-president Anya Kleinman said. At DECA, there are two kinds of competitive events: Written and roleplay. A written event involves preparing a presentation in advance to address a business need in the real world. In contrast, “[a roleplay event] entails taking an exam related to a specific cluster of business, like finance, marketing, or hospitality, and then also preparing an extemporaneous presentation for a judge.” Kleinman said.
Though the biggest priorities for the club are its competitions, this only makes up a small portion of the time that its members spend—the club’s regular meetings to prepare for the competitions take up far more. “Between [SCDC and ICDC, the state and national DECA competitions that RM attends], we have different departments for leadership, so we have training, we have PR, and as [a] president, we’re meant to make sure that people are doing things that they signed up to do or that our schedules are going according to plan,” senior coand -president Kat Xue said. She goes on to describe the complex role that DECA leadership entails and the work that she and her colleagues do to ensure that the club runs smoothly. “We have three busy seasons, I would say,” said Xue, “The first is definitely regional… The other busy sections are SCDC and ICDC.”
SCDC, or the State Career Development Conference, is a statewide competition where qualifying students go to compete at a variety of written and roleplay events. “It’s a lot of fun,” Kleinman said. “Its a full day of networking. You sit in on workshops, and you do your event at one point throughout the day.” At this year’s Maryland SCDC, RM’s DECA team excelled: Over sixty members qualified to attend, and over two dozen of those went on to qualify for ICDC, the nation-wide competition, Kleinman said.
The full list of qualifiers include seniors Sherry Lin, Anya Kleinman, Akhil Vadivel, Jackson Lou, juniors Parim Shah, Quinley Borden, Anita Wei, Maggie Deng, Sophiana Jiang, Zachary Han, Meishung Chen, sophomores Michael Chen, Adithya Ramesh, Aashi Bansal, Arya Sockalingam, Yamini Gupta, Kaylynn Yuan, Aiden Neely, Shreya Shete, Sophia Soldatova and freshmen Anaya Menavan, Hasset Kassa, Ella Wan and Melinda Jiang.
Among those qualifiers were freshman partners Anaya Manavan and Ella Wan, who worked together in preparation for the event. In the weeks leading up to the SCDC, students prepare intensively in hopes of qualifying for the competition. “There were a lot of great mentors, and they prepared you really well for SCDC,” Manavan said. “There were also many opportunities to practice.” Manavan and Wan practiced consistently together, and their teamwork paid off as they qualified for ICDC.
They are now continuing to prepare for the next level of completion. “I competed in a partner role-play event, and we prepared using practice cases available online, along with a qualifying test,” Manavan said. “We also practiced through Quizlet and used flashcards to study.”
New members are supported throughout this process through practice role-play events and workshops. “We have a really good training team that puts together presentations where people can practice. We also do practice role play events.” Kleinman said. “We recently held an event with Churchill DECA, where we brought DECA members together, and it created a really strong sense of community.” While DECA prepares students for competitive business events, it also fosters a community where students with shared interests can collaborate and learn with one another.
Many new students at RM were able to participate in SCDC this year, benefiting from extensive training from DECA mentors and workshops. “There were lots of workshops that we could attend with really helpful information on internships, work experience, and how to create LinkedIn profiles,” freshman Ishita Ranka said. “It’s really fun to network with people from different schools, across the state.”
With SCDC now complete, qualifying students are already turning their attention to the next stage: The International Career Development Conference (ICDC), where competition and preparation reach new heights. As Maryland is a smaller state, qualifying for ICDC, an even more competitive stage, required extra preparation, and students plan to intensify their practice in the final weeks leading up the competition. Qualifiers from RM will now fly all the way to Atlanta to represent the school on a national stage and compete against top competitors from around the world.
