Beth Anne Carroll
Staff Writer

The future of the business world is getting its start at Coppell High School through the Business Professionals of America.

The Business Professionals of America club, or BPA, recently saw 32 of its members qualify for the State Conference, which will be held March 2-5 at the Fort Worth Convention Center. Twenty individuals and eight teams qualified following the regional competition in January. These students will be competing for a chance to qualify for the National Conference in Washington, D.C.

BPA is a national organization that gives students a chance to prepare for a career in business. The national competition is called the Workplace Skills Assessment Program (WSAP). Schools can enter one individual in each event and one team in each team competition in any of four categories: financial services, administrative support or information technology and management/marketing/human resources.

In some events, students are asked to create a product or a business and present it to the judges. In other events, competitors are given a hypothetical situation and they must prepare a speech about how they would respond.

The state qualifiers from Coppell will join 2,500 other delegates from across the state. State delegates will compete in the business skills competition they qualified in.

The purpose of the conferences is to give delegates a chance to learn and participate in workshops to gain experience in business and leadership. Students also have the chance to compete in events at the regional, state and national levels.

“The conference emphasizes business workforce education and the training which members of BPA at CHS have received,” Coppell BPA Red Chapter advisor Jan McClintock said.

The program prides itself on advancing leadership, citizenship, academic and technological skills in its students while preparing them for the workforce. Members of the organization have been working hard to prepare for competition for most of this year.

“My global marketing team started preparing around November, but we really got into it and started meeting a few times a week as soon as winter break ended. This event took a lot of late nights to plan out and practice,” said sophomore Sai Panguluri, a state qualifier in Human Resource Management and Global Marketing.

The CHS chapter of BPA is actually split into two chapters, a black and a red. Every student is assigned an individual and team event, with students from both chapters participating in some of the same events. Each chapter had several students qualify for state.

Students are expected to put forth the time and effort to prepare for their chosen event on their own time, making BPA a big commitment.

“[The preparation] is totally outside of the school day. We have meetings after school, but there are kids that are meeting regularly at Starbucks. There are kids that are meeting semi-regularly at each other’s houses. They are doing it all on their own and then we will just critique them,” Coppell Black Chapter advisor Cindy Wolfe said.

Students first compete at the regional level, where state qualifiers are determined. Students who place high enough at the State Conference qualify for the National Leadership Conference in early May in the nation’s capitol.

According to Panguluri, most events feature six to 15 competitors and the top two qualify. Students in the CHS chapter are required to participate in a team and an individual event.

For the State Conference, chapter members will stay overnight in Fort Worth and visit various places throughout the city.

“The state conference is really fun, we get a lot of freedom and time where we’re just anxiously waiting for our events. It’s nice meeting other CHS people you didn’t know before, and even the other people you’re competing with,” Panguluri said. “I really hope I get to nationals.”

State features a larger number of students than regionals and tougher competition, making it a challenge to reach the national conference, since the state and national competitions vary from the regional conference.

“At state, the presentation becomes much more important than the first time. At nationals, it is really no longer about the product that is really the key, it is the presentation, because in real life it is not really the quality of the product, its how well it is marketed. That is why we think that BPA is a fabulous experience in real life, even though you are in high school,” Wolfe said.

The Coppell delegates have made it a long way and can, hopefully, continue their success at state. One of them could even be representing CHS at the national level among the country’s elite business students.

BPA State Qualifiers:

Sai Panguluri   Ben Huang   Kim Le  Spandana Mudhaliar  Sneha Vasantharao]

Dhriti Mazumdar  Mitu Bhattathiry  Minjae Kim  Catherine Tu  Eric Park

Aaron Bush  Raghu Achukola  Dinesh Seemakurty  Gaurav Nagar

Hanna Kattilakoski  Priya Chitta  Allen McClintock  Adam Warner

Mohit Joshi  Ashlyn Foster  Hasika Sarathy  Ashley Attanucci  Violet Coker

Aneri Nagrecha  Bella Shah  Nimi Bhattathiry  Kevin Chow  Shivani Reddy

Rahul Shetty