Ученица из Южной Каролины Анна И стала первой за долгое время победительницей национального конкурса FBLA в категории общественных объявлений

While rising senior Anna Yi waited on stage as a finalist in a national FBLA competition, a wave of disbelief came over her. “I don’t think I had a real thought that I was going to be No. 1 until they called second place, and I was the only one left on stage,” said Yi, a Fort Dorchester student who competed in the public service announcement category. Brie Scott, a career and technical education teacher and adviser for FBLA, was visibly emotional after the win, as Yi was the first South Carolina student to win in this division in a long time. “We had kids that had other members on FaceTime watching,” said Scott. “We had members up towards the front waiting for Anna to come back with her medal.” Gerald Taylor, the co-advisor for FBLA, was also in San Antonio supporting the Fort Dorchester team. “As they’re calling the names, you get more and more excited and you get more and more nervous,” Taylor shared. Yi's victory is especially significant for the FBLA at Fort Dorchester. “It has brought so much recognition already,” Scott said. “I got an email yesterday from an advisor in Utah congratulating us and wanting to know if he could have a copy of [Yi's] video.” Scott took over the leadership of FBLA after the club had been pushed on the back burner due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, she has grown the club from around a dozen students to over 50. In recent years, the club has been awarded a Gold Seal and recognized as a Gold Champion Chapter. The Gold Seal is for chapters in South Carolina that have gone above and beyond, attending conferences, participating in leadership activities, and community service events. This award is hand-selected by the state advisor, and Scott’s chapter has been chosen two years in a row. It was the first year that the club had received the Gold Champion Chapter award, which is a recognition of completing objectives throughout the year like recruitment, leadership activities and community service. “I’m thankful that I have a great student leadership team,” Scott said. “They set themselves up in committees to which they each took a certain season of activities throughout the champion chapter year.” FBLA promotes student success by teaching them soft skills, such as networking, running meetings, organization, record keeping and fundraising. “Even if they have a great academic record when they get out of high school, a lot of those skills that employees are looking for aren’t something that can be taught out of a textbook,” Scott remarked. Yi joined FBLA her sophomore year of high school and has served as the club’s historian, social media manager and chapter president. Before competing at nationals, Yi and her partner, Kaitlyn Dang, went through multiple qualifying rounds. In the regional rounds, their project came in third. In states, they came in fourth. Cyberbullying Before nationals, Yi made some major changes to the script for the project, which was a PSA video on cyberbullying. Her project differed from the others because instead of solely focusing on the victims, she also recognized the bullies. “The root of the issue is the bully,” Yi said. “But what is the bully going through? Obviously, what they’re doing is wrong, and I don’t justify it in my video, but I did want to emphasize that sometimes bullies do things out of their own personal hurt.” Not only did judges evaluate the script and video quality, but they also questioned students on the revisions that had been made since the state competitions. Evaluating the PSA video was only part of the competition. “I think that the hardest part for me was that I had a partner initially, but she unfortunately wasn’t able to join me at nationals,” said Yi. Kaitlyn Dang, Yi’s FBLA and DECA partner for three years, graduated from Fort Dorchester in May. She is an incoming biomedical studies student at the University of South Florida. “We did every business [project] together,” Yi said. “It was nerve-wracking going from doing [the presentation] with somebody I really cherish…to having to do it alone because of circumstances.” Club funds couldn’t cover both girls’ trip to San Antonio and with preparing for her freshman year of college, Dang decided against attending. Previously, the students had leaned on each other to calm their nerves. “I get really nervous, and in my opinion… my voice gets really shaky,” Yi said. “I think my mom heard my presentation about a million times. She was like ‘I don’t need to know this all; I’m not bullying anyone.’” Though she won nationals as a future business leader, Yi has something a little different in mind for her future. “I really want to be a history teacher, specifically for AP world history,” Yi said, smiling. “History is really fun when you have the right teacher, and it can also be really hard if you have the wrong teacher.” Yi looks forward to taking a teacher cadet educational psychology class at Fort Dorchester, where she will continue to learn how to create lesson plans and classroom management. She will also be serving a second year as the chapter president of FBLA.