On Mar. 24, students attended the Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA)’s second mini-conference of the year. This event gave students an accurate representation of what they can expect at a state or national conference if they decide to join the club.

This event featured a role-play where students proposed marketing ideas, a 40 multiple-choice test covering various topics from business administration to marketing, and a workshop on emotional intelligence with the Northern California District Action Team (NorCal DAT).

“Because we did have access workshops for Minicons usually, having the opportunity to talk to officers and learning from them is a great way to up themselves in the game and I hope that they definitely learned a lot about how to talk to a judge in a DECA roleplay and learn unique aspects and certain strategies to stand out in actual DECA conferences in the future,” said DECA President Andrea Yang (‘23).

The Minicon is an accurate, yet scaled-down representation of what one can expect in the State and International Career Development Conferences (SCDC / ICDC). Although the Minicon event has no prerequisites, in order to join the DECA club and attend these national conferences, one must be part of a business CTE course.

“The whole purpose of the club is preparing you for these events and using what you learned in the business classes to compete in these events,” said DECA Advisor Rabia Marjan Akrami.

In recent months, interest towards the club has increased. This is due to the benefits it offers, from helping students develop their communication to general business skills.

“The leadership had a lot to prepare for the event. For this event, they had more newcomers and people who wanted to try out so they had an introductory meeting and accesses open for preparation and the officers helped newcomers practice role-plays and practice tests, ” said Arnav Dhole (‘25).

Using their experience from the previous Minicon, the officer teams were able to foresee and troubleshoot any problems in order to have smooth rotations and a well-coordinated event.

“Something I would’ve done differently is our marketing strategies, going around to freshmen and sophomore classes to directly promote this event would have potentially attracted more new participants who could be interested in DECA,” said Yang.

Many students have found this club as valuable experience and a great preview into the club before joining it and taking the business class.

“It’s really a fun event where you can go with your friends. I hope that [students] can understand what Minicon and DECA is about and they enjoy it, and they want to give it a try by signing up for the class next year, join it, and get to go to all these cool conferences,” said Dhole.