On Thursday, March 11, 21 Freedom students part of the DECA team found out they were advancing to ICDC, the International Career Development Conference. These students had advanced from the state level competition to qualify for ICDC.

“We have 21 students competing and five students attending as a part of the Leadership Program,”  said Laura Rominski, one of the DECA sponsors. “This is even more than we were going to have last year when the Conference in Nashville was cancelled due to [COVID-19]!”

Even with COVID-19 changing the way that the competition had run, students had managed to overcome the challenges of competing in a different format and advance to the next level. Rominski believes that while the change had been challenging, students did a wonderful job adapting to the new format. 

“One of the biggest differences between in-person and virtual is that the students have specific time windows the week prior to the conference dates during which they are to record their event for submission,” Rominski said. “So they actually do their competition prior to the conference leadership sessions and awards ceremony. With in-person conferences, students all compete on one day, which is always such an exciting and fun day!”

The change from an in-person to online competition had many other effects too. Rominski believes that there are pros and cons to the change.

“The benefit of competing virtually is that the students can practice and review their virtual competitive submissions prior to finalizing,” Rominski said. “This allows for more personal reflection and analyzing of their strengths and weaknesses during the event. Students do compete within a certain timeframe, but they do not have the face-to-face interaction and pressure of thinking quickly on their feet with immediate responses. DECA has done an amazing job of switching to a virtual competition platform, having improved each step of the way from Districts to States to ICDC.”

The students advancing to ICDC will compete on April 19-23.