Every year, a handful of Lynbrook DECA members qualify for the international DECA conference (ICDC), which draws more than 21,000 attendees from around the globe. This year, 13 Lynbrook DECA members qualified for ICDC through Virtual Business Challenge (VBC), an all-time high for Lynbrook and the most qualifiers out of any school in DECA’s western region.

Through VBC, competitors apply their business knowledge to online business simulations. There are seven tracks to compete in, from managing a restaurant through VBC Restaurant to over-seeing the profits of hotels through VBC Hotel Management, and students can participate in as many tracks as they like. VBC’s two qualifying rounds are held online during October and January, lasting 11 days each. Participants can compete individually or in groups of up to three people, and every round, the top two teams of each track in each region advance to ICDC. 

Juniors Gaby Tran, Vincent Su, Naman Singhal, Arjun Kumar and Aman Kumpawat and seniors Aayush Seth, Anay Deshpande, Arnav Doshi, Pranav Kadiyala and Bharath Kumar qualified during round one, and seniors Aditya Guruprusad, Samyak Navad and Snehith Nayak qualified during round two. 

Deshpande, Bharath Kumar and Arjun Kumar qualified for ICDC through two events, VBC Restaurant and VBC Retail, and attribute their success to their competitive mentality. Bharath Kumar went above and beyond by reaching out to retail company employees to understand how he could apply real-world retail concepts to his VBC projects. 

“We thought of VBC as more of an actual business versus a lot of people who thought of VBC as just a game,” Bharath Kumar said. “That’s really the difference between winning and losing. You can spend more than 80 hours and still not win or spend 25 quality hours and still do the same.”

With ICDC only three months away, Lynbrook’s qualifiers are hard at work preparing for the high pressure atmosphere and gathering of ambitious students.

“It is important to understand that VBC at ICDC is much more challenging than it was during the qualifying rounds,” Arjun Kumar said. “You need to think and work much more efficiently as you only have 15 minutes to generate the most profit, as opposed to almost two weeks.”

As the qualifiers are busy honing their skills and sharpening their minds, we wish the best of luck to our Lynbrook representatives!