“I’m thankful that I have a great student leadership team,” Scott said. “They set themselves up in committees to which they each took a certain season of activities throughout the champion chapter year.”
FBLA promotes student success by teaching them soft skills, such as networking, running meetings, organization, record keeping and fundraising.
“Even if they have a great academic record when they get out of high school, a lot of those skills that employees are looking for aren’t something that can be taught out of a textbook,” Scott remarked.
Yi joined FBLA her sophomore year of high school and has served as the club’s historian, social media manager and chapter president.
Before competing at nationals, Yi and her partner, Kaitlyn Dang, went through multiple qualifying rounds. In the regional rounds, their project came in third. In states, they came in fourth.
Cyberbullying
Before nationals, Yi made some major changes to the script for the project, which was a PSA video on cyberbullying. Her project differed from the others because instead of solely focusing on the victims, she also recognized the bullies.
“The root of the issue is the bully,” Yi said. “But what is the bully going through? Obviously, what they’re doing is wrong, and I don’t justify it in my video, but I did want to emphasize that sometimes bullies do things out of their own personal hurt.”
Not only did judges evaluate the script and video quality, but they also questioned students on the revisions that had been made since the state competitions. Evaluating the PSA video was only part of the competition.
“I think that the hardest part for me was that I had a partner initially, but she unfortunately wasn’t able to join me at nationals,” said Yi.
Kaitlyn Dang, Yi’s FBLA and DECA partner for three years, graduated from Fort Dorchester in May. She is an incoming biomedical studies student at the University of South Florida.
