Vernon Hills High School FBLA students recognized at National Leadership Conference

The Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) National Leadership Conference was held in Anaheim, California, June 29 through July 2, 2017. This year’s theme was Legacy of Leadership. More than 9,600 future business leaders attended the conference, competed in leadership events, shared successes, and learned new ideas about shaping their careers through workshops, motivational speakers, and exhibits. This four-day conference is considered the pinnacle of the FBLA-PBL experience. This year, Vernon Hills High School had 37 National Competitors. The club has 107 members.

Two teams from Vernon Hills High School received national recognition at the FBLA Awards of Excellence Program on July 2. Michael Kokkines, Oliver Leung, and Derek Zhang competed in Marketing and brought home second place. Aparajitha Adiraju, Ashwini Deshpande, and Pavani Pandravada competed in Emerging Business Issues and brought home eighth place. The award was part of a comprehensive national competitive events program sponsored by FBLA-PBL that recognizes and rewards excellence in a broad range of business and career-related areas.

Other competitors from Vernon Hills High School included: Eunice Yoon – Business Calculations, Matthew Weiss, Eric Yun, Daniel Yong – Business Financial Plan, Hayden Lau, Anmol Parande, Neel Choudhary – Computer Game & Simulation Programming, Gina Liu, Gita Bhardwaj – E-Business, Nathan Ju, Kelsey Carido, Zachary Yurkovsky – Hospitality Management, Justina Chua - Intro to Business Communications, Rohet Chitikela - Intro to Financial Math, Ben Gorashchenko - Intro to Financial Math, Sohan Barot, Heesung Noh, Fernando Bravo - Management Decision Making, Ravi Gandhi, Steven Tow, Harsha Namburi - Public Service Announcement, Martin Bolotin - Securities and Investments, Grace Lim, Katie Cheon, Kathy Chen - Social Media Campaign, Chloe Cho, Vaishu Popuri - Website Design, and Lauren Lum - Word Processing. Open computer event competitors included Garima Arora, Tim Lee and Nhi Lu.

FBLA club advisers are Tony Isabelli, Shawn Woodie, and Diane Phillips. “I am very proud of all of our national competitors. Each one did a great job in their competition event. This is the largest group that Vernon Hills High School has taken to the FBLA National Leadership Conference in the history of the school. Way to go Vernon Hills High School FBLA!” said Diane Phillips.