By Pritika Thotakura
On Friday and Saturday, Feb. 2, 96 IHS HOSA members will be competing at the annual Area 3 competition at Plano East Senior High School. It takes determined students with top-notch communications skills to have a chance at passing Area and going beyond to State and Nationals. With input from some experienced chapter members, here are our tips to doing your best at the competition.
Confidence in one’s work is key when coming out into a crowd with the judges who will be deciding every groups fate. In order to have this, you need to have faith that you put in as much work as possible.
“You need to put on a strong face, because everyone is nervous,” junior Mona Ardeshna, who competed in Healthcare Issues, said. “Just try your best, and if it works out it’s great, but if it doesn’t, there is always next year.”
When working on your event, be prepared to spend hours on perfecting every detail of your speech or presentation, or studying as much as you can. Junior Manu Jarajapu, who competed in Community Awareness last year, said that background knowledge is key.
“We first met up a couple of times to figure out our topic and then we slowly got into research and interviews,” Manu said. “We learned how to spread more awareness on our topic because we come from middle class families so we didn’t have much knowledge about malnutrition.”
If you’re confused on where to start, the guidelines are the best place to do so. They can be found online, and contain all the information required for your event.
“The first thing I did was look at the guidelines,” Mona said. “For healthcare issues, it gave you all the resources, information, and guidelines you needed to be best prepared for your event.”
As HOSA competition is usually during school, many competitors find it difficult to balance school and work for HOSA. Thus, time-management is crucial to success.
“You have to keep up your grades to compete in HOSA, so school comes first,” Mona said. “It’s really hard to manage and it gets in the way at times, but if you are serious about HOSA, then you should put in the time because it’s beneficial in the long run.”
HOSA Competition may snatch much needed time for homework, but at times it can irritate students even more when needs are not met in teams.
“You're obviously going to compete with your friends,” Manu said, “so try to make sure you all agree with something and that everyone puts in effort because it’s all a group effort so if you don’t put in effort don’t expect your friends to be ok with it. I have heard of so many groups where friendships are broken just because of HOSA.”
Social tensions and strains on grades may increase because of the new workload. This is why it's advised to set checkpoints to monitor research progress and avoid procrastination.
"Definitely don’t procrastinate,” Mona said. “I fell behind a little when school started picking up. [December] just pulled up really fast so you need to stay committed and set a goal for each week in order to get everything done.”
Though balance may be tough, preparing for HOSA competition should not interfere with school work. In times when it seems impossible, keep in mind that after the area competition, it only gets better.
“Once you go past Area it’s pretty fun,” Mona said. “Also, it’s not just about yourself because there are so many other teams from our school that do well, and it’s fun watching them go up and stage and cheering them on.”
Comments