Wauconda hosts Future Business Leaders conference
More than 700 students participated in Saturday's Future Business Leaders of America Northern Area Conference in Wauconda.
Wauconda High School hosted the event, which also saw more than 300 business community members involved in judging competitions, presenting workshops or volunteering.
Students from East Leyden, Grant, Grayslake Central, Grayslake North, Hononegah, Huntley, Lake Zurich, Libertyville, Mundelein, Ridgewood, Stevenson, Vernon Hills, Warren, West Chicago and West Leyden competed in more than 60 events.
The events included both aptitude tests and judged presentations.
Wauconda High School juniors Kira Ziolkowski and Jordan Tidwell together presented a talk on how new apps can build one's customer base and revenue.
While glad to gain in-depth knowledge about an area of business they may go into as their careers, they both saw the improvement of their public speaking and confidence as the most practical skills they developed.
"We'll use this for the rest of our lives," Tidwell said.
In contrast, senior Andrea Thiltgen's presentation on robotic prosthetics represented exactly the biomedical engineering career she plans to begin pursuing at Marquette University this fall.
Thiltgen said she was pleased to be able to focus on a specific area of interest this year, having already built up her confidence with an award-winning presentation during her own junior year.
At the FBLA Area Conference, students compete to qualify for the state competition in Springfield in March. There, students must place in the top three in their event to qualify for the national competition, which happens to be in Chicago this summer.
Steve Diol, a Wauconda resident who works in Barrington as a Wells Fargo finance adviser, was among the business community leaders who spoke at the conference.
His son David, who's now at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, also happened to be the student who first started the FBLA chapter at Wauconda High School six year ago.
Based on both his professional and personal experiences, the elder Diol gave college financial tips to students Saturday. These included everything from not ruling out two years at a community college if it makes financial sense to making sure they understood all their incidental costs on campus.
Not the least of their concerns should be getting an educated guess as to what their monthly student loans payments are going to be after graduation, Diol said.
Wauconda High has never before hosted the FBLA Area Conference, the school's FBLA adviser Wendy Mills said. Wauconda hosted this year's event because senior Chris Nachman, the school's FBLA chapter president, was elected last year as the Northern Area president.