By Karen Neill
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On Feb. 9 and 10, the SkillsUSA state competition took place at the Hawaii Convention Center, leaving MHS with five first place students, four second place students and six third place students throughout all categories.
“I think Mililani did pretty good this year. There were a lot of people who placed, you know, in a lot of competitions that were very, very close. The competition spans not just Oahu but just basically everybody, all islands in Hawaii, whoever wants to show up, so even placing is a very incredible feat for most of these guys,” said SkillsUSA adviser Blaise Hanagami.
Because SkillsUSA encompasses almost all Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses, the competition consisted of multiple project opportunities for students in each specialized category. First place winner Senior Christine Svrcina explained, “(For graphics), there are a lot of different competitions that graphics can do. (You can do) ad design, designing posters, job skill demo, that’s also graphics. So what I did was Promotional Bulletin Board and I created a four foot by four foot board with my partner, (Senior Lydia Strickland), to promote SkillsUSA.”
For competition, the students had to put together all their knowledge gathered from their CTE classes to accomplish a task given. “The theme this year was ‘SkillsUSA, 50 years of champions at work,’ so we had to promote that theme on our board and somehow make that into a visual and make it visually appealing and make sure it draws attention and has all the aspects of what we were taught in graphics. So it has the ‘Z’ pattern, colors that match (and) we had to explain why we put everything on there because everything we put on there has to have a reason,” said Svrcina.
Some competitors are no longer in their CTE classes because they already finished all the courses, making their biggest struggle finding the time to work. However, those students made the time to make their projects work. “When it comes to preparation, the hardest part was time management,” explained Senior Mick Marchan, first place winner for Networking. “Because I’m not in the class anymore it was up to me to study on my own and when I had free time I had to go read a book that was like 1000 pages long.” Hanagami added, “It’s extremely complicated just because there are so many people involved in so many different things. You have people who have commitment to SkillsUSA but at the same time they have commitments to other clubs such as, I don’t know, Leo Club, National Honor Society, Robotics, the list goes on and on. So to be honest with you, a lot of the students who’ve found success in terms of my competition, there was a lot of self-study on their part, you know just kind of falling back on things that they had previously learned in the classroom, but it’s tough. It’s really tough.”
Although there was a lot of hard work and stress involved, the students were still able to enjoy the competition for various reasons. In addition students found this a great opportunity to learn and expand their knowledge. “(At competition), you realize how much you have left to learn and that kind of motivates you to do more, especially at the national level where usually first place gets around 70 percent of the points,” said Marchan. “It’s pretty nuts but it’s cool to find out that you have so much left to do. I would say that’s my favorite part, because I have a lot to study now.” Svrcina added, “The fun thing we had was a social that all the organizations got together and sent their kids to go dance or do karaoke. Karaoke was insanely hilarious to listen to. I didn’t join, but I went dancing.”
After such successes on the state competition, SkillsUSA students are now looking forward to nationals. The national competition will be held in the summer in Louisville, Ky., students and advisers alike are using as much time as they can to prepare for the next competition.
