Five Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) students went to Hollywood, California to compete at the LifeSmarts Nationals competition against 32 other schools and won 17th place.
“It’s sort of like a game show since there are a lot of buzzing rounds and five categories on consumer knowledge,” team captain and senior Michael Benson said. The following categories students competed in were Technology, Consumer Protection, Personal Finance, Environment and Health & Safety.
“We’ll just be sitting up on stage with our buzzers and they’ll ask us some individual questions,” Benson said. “There’s also a free-for-all round, but besides that we have a couple of different activities that we work together as a team to complete.”
The team’s focused on the safe use of prescription medication and over-the-counter drugs.
“We could’ve done better,” junior and Environment competitor Shannon Escobar said.
Benson agreed, saying “we definitely had some stuff we could have improved on, but we placed better than the team last year.”
According to Benson, last year’s LifeSmarts team placed somewhere around 23rd place. He believed that competition between the years was incomparable because team members and experiences varied.
“There were a lot more senior teams last year than there were this year so there were a lot of young teams this year,” he said.
To prepare for the competition, Escobar said each student on the team was given an test on their category.
The five were given a glossary of terms containing information about the five categories.
Additionally to studying a glossary, the students took online quizzes on the LifeSmarts website and they “stayed after and used questions from previous years,” junior and Health & Safety competitor Corey Martin said.
According to Escobar, they “also practiced buzzing because that was a big aspect of [their] competition.”
During the trip, competitors were able to tour Universal Studios as well as Hollywood Boulevard.