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Business Professionals of America🔗︎

The Road to Nationals🔗︎

Each year, the Business Professionals of America hosts a nationwide competition for high school students in business-oriented events. I had competed in team UIL programming competitions, but I had not had the chance to compete as an individual before. This competition was my chance to prove myself as a valuable asset.

There were several programming events to choose from, but the one that interested me the most was the C# event. C# was one of my favorite programming languages at the time (along with Python) because of its many syntactical features that allowed me to be more productive. The way that this event worked was that I would be given a mockup of a user interface to design in Windows Forms with Visual Studio. I would have 90 minutes to recreate the interface along with the business logic to make it functional. The premise is simple, but the event becomes more complex when you consider that the test can require creating multiple forms, processing files, implementing data structures, or manipulating an Access database.

The most difficult aspect of the competition was that accessing documentation or StackOverflow was not allowed. This doesn't seem like a big deal until you start losing points for not remembering what the DateTime format codes are or how to specify the filter for an OpenFileDialog. I spent a lot of time studying these nuances to prepare for the competition. I successfully placed third in Texas and advanced to the national competition in Washington D.C.! Unfortunately, the national competition was cancelled due to the pandemic.

Awards🔗︎

  • Business Professionals of America Competition - C# Windows Forms (Spring 2020)
    • Regional Leadership Conference - 1st Place Individual
    • Texas State Leadership Conference - 3rd Place Individual
    • National Qualifier (Competition Cancelled due to COVID-19)