A few weeks ago on December 12, Belmont Hill’s DECA club participated in their first-ever conference and our students managed to take home 3 awards. Special congratulations to Brandon Li ’26 who placed 2nd in the Principles of Marketing, Chase Teeson ’26 who placed 3rd in Hotel and Lodging Management, Emerson Walker ’25 who placed 8th in the Accounting and Application Series, and Ms. Zener for mentoring the club and coaching them along the way.
DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) is an organization that hosts business-related competitions for high schoolers. Each competition consists of a 100-question written exam portion where students must score 70 or above in order to move on to the next round. The second section involves a roleplay where the students are individually placed in scenarios based on their chosen topics. These topics ranged from human resources, where the students learned to interact with customers when running a business, to marketing and finance, where the students learned how to manage profits and advertise a business.
The regional conference was held at the Boxboro Regency Hotel & Conference Center, with dozens of other public and private schools around Massachusetts. The students spent most of their time practicing and prepping before their individual competitions. Afterward, students mostly studied for their Belmont Hill midterm exams–as they had to miss the first day of exams to participate–and networked with students from other schools. The club is excited for next year’s conference, as well as other in-school events planned in the upcoming weeks. When asked about his experience at the conference, Brandon Li said “Overall, it was a great experience, and we’re hoping to perform even better next year.”
