TSA State Leadership Conference 2023
This past week, my school’s Technology Student Association (TSA) chapter attended the annual 2023 State Leadership Conference (SLC) in Athens, GA. SLC is a typically 2-3 day event on the University of Georgia campus where students come to compete in over 35 events. As a school, we competed against over 130 different chapters, and we prevailed! Our chapter won 1st place across Georgia in Animatronics and Geospatial Technology. Additionally, after submitting an instrumental and a written portfolio and participating in an interview. Additionally, my team also won 1st place in Music Production for the school. All three of our chapter’s teams who placed will proceed to the national conference in Louisville, Kentucky this June.
This was my second time attending the State Leadership Conference, and there were a few stark differences from my experience last year. This year, I was much more involved in planning the trip than I was last year, and that gave me a lot of opportunity to engage members of the club more. To select the students who could attend the conference, we decided to host a qualifying competition within the school across the chapter in the different events. Doing so not only allowed us to choose the most qualified competitors to compete for the school, but also prepare students for that atmosphere, and have a lot of fun in the process. We brought in business partners of the school to judge several events, provided them an abundance of cookies (which I reaped the benefits of), and effectively replicated what SLC was going to be, but on a smaller scale a few months ahead.
My competition–Music Production–was on the first day of the conference. We left school around 4:00 AM on a bus to make it to the conference center on time. Many of my friends and I woke up around 2:30 AM and spent the day on not more than 45 minutes of sleep (we became victims of our own sleeping decisions). That day, me and three other team members had our competition for Music Production around noon, which solely consisted of an interview about the music instrumental we submitted before the conference, and were selected as Semifinalists from. In the interview, we talked about The Chainsmokers, Pharell Williams, Pierre Bourne, FL Studio, and the creative process behind the instrumental.
The 2023 State Leadership Conference was as enjoyable as I had hoped it would be. The trip was characterized by a nurturing atmosphere, a sense of community, and several long nights–we even made an Instagram account hilariously dedicated to posting pictures of members of our chapter who were sleeping between events! There are now pictures of me on the internet sitting soundly asleep on a windowsill. I was thrilled to see our chapter perform as well as we did, and I am so excited to reunite in Louisville this summer for Nationals!
