Manhattan High qualified 15 students for nationals at the State Leadership Conference of Business Professionals of America on Feb 15-17 in Wichita. MHS was among 25 high schools from around Kansas that competed with a total of 521 students.

“Each student has to compete,” BPA sponsor Kristen Hopkins said. “They get to choose their event and they compete in two different events; some events are test events, some events are presenting events.”

MHS has a total of six State champions: junior Angie Chae in Economic Research; sophomore Nutsa Samushia in SQL Database; seniors Anna Jund, Eli Kunz and Carter Oehme in the Global Marketing Team; and junior Markus Hoehn in C# Programming.

MHS had an additional 27 students who finished in top 10.

“We did really well in some of the programming events,” Hopkins said. “We did well in the design events, we also did really well in the marketing events.”

BPA placed first in the global marketing team, third place in global marketing and fifth place in small business management.

“There was an opening ceremony,” junior Angie Chae said. “We met a lot of new people and then we did our events and we had a social event on Friday night…then we had a closing ceremony.”

While some BPA categories were prepared in advance, in others students had to create everything at the contest after receiving a prompt and writing a paper over it, then they present it to the judges.

“There is a lot of work prior to going to state. Some students have been preparing for it since October, November,” Hopkins said. “In some of their events they had to pre-submit their entrances in January.”

There are some strong competitors in graphic design and programming. However even with the competition, they take time to have some fun. The social event lets competitors enjoy their time and get to know each other.

“Just getting to know people…there is food, games and a small dance floor,” Chae said. “I feel like BPA is just to get to know more people…get to share your experiences.”