In their final competition of the year, members of Technology Student Association and Future Business Leaders of America set off to represent Diamond Bar High School in their respective annual national competitions.

The FBLA conference spanned from June 29-July 2 while the TSA conference took place June 28-July 2. The two events gathered aspiring business and technology minded students to compete with thousands of others from across the country. Of the 15,000 FBLA members invited nationwide to compete in Atlanta, Georgia, only one student was from DBHS. On the other hand, thirteen TSA members from DBHS traveled to Nashville, Tennessee to compete against 7,000 other students.

In his first year attending the National FBLA Conference, sophomore Jason Zhao placed second in Introduction to Information Technology.  

“Meeting people, watching officer campaigns, and watching some of the performance events at state was really eye-opening,” he said via Facebook.

To prepare for his event, Zhao used online resources and participated in FBLA study sessions. He said that his prior experience with computers helped him in his event.

“I am die-hard passionate about programming. As of now, my plan is to go into software engineering.”

Students competed in business related events under several categories including objective testing, presentation events, and team performance. Objective events such as Introduction to IT tested each competitor’s understanding of basic concepts in computer principles, equipment, terminology, and application concepts with a written test.

At the National TSA Conference, senior Bernard Chen placed sixth in Desktop Publishing. Additionally, sophomores Alan Zhang, Kenneth Chen, Christine Zhou, Jason Zhao, and senior Arman Shah, reached the semi-finals working as a team in Webmaster.

As semi-finalists, the group went through a 10 minute interview. They were asked a series of questions about their teamwork and project. Like the other competitive events, they were graded using a rubric.

“During our interview preparation, I kept running through my head what I’d say during the interview, which made it even more nerve-wracking because I realized that this was real,” sophomore Christine Zhou said.

“Although we did not end up winning a significant amount of recognition at a national level, we are not disappointed because [Bernard and I] can both see the improvements and advances that our members made from last year to this year,” TSA Vice President Jason Chang said via Facebook.