Throughout  April 26-28, MVFBLA members participated in the annual California Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) State Leadership Conference at the Sacramento Convention Center. High school students from all over the state gathered to compete in diverse events held at the conference, such as business ethics, global business and marketing.

At the conference, many MVFBLA members were able to rank high in their events and advance to nationals. According to junior Daniel Duan, some of the results were unexpected — however, in general, the results were similar to last year. Duan’s team, including junior Nikhil Sathye and junior Rushil Saha, competed in an impromptu competition where they were able to win second place.

“For my team, we took a 100-question multiple choice test regarding banking and financial systems,” Duan said. “The day after that the top five teams went on to the speaking portion. We made it to the speaking portion, so we were basically given a case study and we had to present a solution to a panel of judges.”

Like Duan, sophomore Vivian Jiang similarly competed in a team parliamentary procedure speaking event — this was an event based on performing a parliamentary procedural meeting, as well as involvement in an individual introduction to a parliamentary procedure testing event. Jiang finished second place at her team competition and first place at her individual competition.

“[The] results were really good,” Jiang said. “I’m really proud of how our team did. I was really surprised because I didn’t think I was going to do that well. Being on stage gave me a rush of excitement and I was really happy when I found out the results because they just call the results out on stage.”

However, these positive results were not easy to achieve — the MVFBLA members invested countless hours of personal free time to prepare for their events.

“We got our teams during October, so up until April, we met either once every week or once every two weeks just going through testing and speaking practice,” Duan said. “Once we hit April, we just started meeting every day because the conference was so soon.”

Despite all the hard work that went into each competitive event, MVFBLA members were relieved that it all paid off in the end. Freshman Marissa Jensen is among one of these satisfied members that echo this sentiment, as her team won first place in their competition.

“[When it got announced that we got first], we were all really happy and we had [a celebration] planned for if we got first, but we didn’t do it because we were overly excited and didn’t think about it,” Jensen said. “When you get first it definitely feels like it was all worth it.”