By Staff
GRAND RAPIDS -Hundreds of business professionals recently descended upon Grand Rapids to demonstrate business management, marketing, and technology skills, network with others, and receive honors for their hard work.
What separates this event from any other business conference? The business professionals in attendance at this conference are still in high school.
Student members of the Niles High School Chapter of Business Professionals of America showed their skills and brought home the awards at the 2007 Regional Leadership Conference held Jan. 12.
Niles High School shined at the Regional Leadership Conference as 11 students qualified to represent their school at the state level in March. Winners included Akeziah Hodges, fourth place Legal Office Procedures; Cassandra Negron, third place Keyboarding Production; Autumn Lucero, fifth place Keyboarding Production; Chandel Lawrence, seventh place Medical Office Procedures; Chris Archer, third place Desktop Publishing; Paul Butler, seventh place Management/Marketing/HR; Ryan Nicholls, fifth place Administrative Support Concepts; Nicole Weber, second place Financial Math and Analysis. The second place team winners in Financial Analyst Team were Nathan Fink, Chandel Lawrence, Jordan Hendricks and Steven Woelfel.
These students will represent Niles at the 2007 State Leadership Conference on March 15 through 18, at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, where they will compete with students from across Michigan, attend workshops designed to aid in professional development and gain valuable skills for their lives ahead in the world of work. Top students at the state conference will advance to the May 2007 National Leadership Conference held in New York City.
Other students competing were Nathan Allison, Patricia Anton, Zachary Bloss, Mathew Colburn, Lena Cramer, Justin Duncan, Denise Echavarria, Daniel Geiger, Alicia Gipson, Heather Haas, Nicholas Hartman, Kaleigh Hill, Jeffrey Hoida, Daniel Holland, Amber Horvath, Jenna Ignowski, Jeffery Jurgonski, Kelsey Neilson, Lindsay Prenkert, Sheena Reed, Danielle Rothfuchs, Rachel Smith, Alex Welch, and Sydney Willis.
Business Professionals of America is a national career/technical student organization for business students on the high school and college levels with more than 54,000 members across the country. The organization strives to prepare a world-class workforce through the advancement of leadership, citizenship, academic, and technological skills.
Students gain valuable real-world experience through membership in Business Professionals of America as they network with students and business professionals from across the state and nation, better their community through service-learning projects and compete in demonstrations of their business technology skills on the regional, state and national levels.
Business Professionals of America is today's students, tomorrow's business professionals.