DECA PROVINCIALS

First year at DECA so my experience with Provincials is totally new and frankly WOW.

At first,  from other accounts, going to Provs was rather boring due to the fact that there is a lot of sitting around and waiting (since I was in the team category I only need to present once orally and do an exam another day), and also because of the rather unappetizing fact of having to do a 100 question multiple choice exam which consists of 50% of our final rank weight. But... despite what others say I found DECA Provs to be amazing and sooooo fun :)

I'm not going to go fully into detail since it's 12 am right now and I've only gotten 4 hours of sleep last night (studying for the written exam) and am currently running on half a cup of coffee ingested at 8 in the morning but I'll say this.
MY SCHOOL SWEPT.

It's all creds to our trainers ofc. JS and AS our trainers for my marketing communications category did an amazing job and managed to whip me, a first time DECA newbie, from a complete novice to the Top 5 Regionals Team and also to go on to earn Top 15 in the written exam rankings at the Provincial level, resulting in Amy (my partner) and I both earning nice shiny medals.

Although we didn't make it to ICDC (Oh well there's always next year) it's still been a fantastic experience and I'm so happy that the effort paid off and the lack of sleep was worth it.
Especially the lack of sleep.
Like seriously.
Since our school is rather far from the Centre, I had to drag myself up at 5:30 am to arrive at school by 6:00 am and then to endure the half hour long ride arriving at the convention by around 7:00 due to delays,  traffic and etc. And my exam is at 8. Oh joy.

The funny thing is, I never expected to win the writtens. I've always relied on orals before to win due to my public speaking skills honed from debate and half heartedly at most studied for writtens. I literally didn't study almost at all until the night before the exam ... not a recommended path as I ended up staying up until 1 am and getting 4 hours of sleep. It worked this time but no way am I planning on doing it again... writing the exam was like hell with my pounding headache and bleary eyes.
Lesson learned.

So writtens turned out pretty well ... As for orals I have no idea where we messed up. Sure maybe it went a bit over the time limit but the body language from the judge was quite favorable most of the time... so for us not to have gotten the Top 15 Overall teams while having gotten the top writtens scores must have meant a major messup in orals. Oh well, too late to remedy it now... I'll definitely take this as a lesson learned and prep more with my partner next year.

So all in all it was an amazingly fun two days... so looking forward to partaking in this again next year! :D

More to come!