DECA students competed in round one of the virtual business challenge Oct. 20-30. The personal finance team, the Wifi Routers, placed second out of 25 other teams advancing to round two in January. 

In the contest Karis Hu, Nathan Cong and Hillary Xu individually competed through simulations where they were in charge of a single person’s financing with the goal of making as much money as possible. Then all their profits were added together.

“The virtual business competition is where you have a person just out of, I think college or high school, and basically, you do their personal finances,” Xu said. “It’s like Sims, but with one person and you try to make sure they survive.”

 Students can use their experience and knowledge of the contest to find the loopholes to earn more money.

“The goal of the contest is to make as much money as possible for your character in the simulation. I think, towards the end, since we were second, Karis was thinking of ways to do tax evasion,” Xu said. “Since she pretty much maxed out everything else.”

 Round two will take place Jan. 9, and continue for a week. After round two takes place the virtual business competitions will be over for this year.

“It was an incredible experience. This in itself is structured to sort of imparting learning whilst maintaining sort of maintaining an outside appearance,” Hu said. “It was a thrill to go through it, and honestly every time that there was some sort of advancement, it was exhilarating.”

There aren’t any judges at the competition, it’s purely based on reflections and understanding the challenge while being able to adjust to the situation.

“We didn’t necessarily get feedback per se, it’s more reflective than it is imitative,” Hu said. “And then you can figure out what could have gone better and what things could you innovate upon to sort of improve your overall score, and then you just had to apply to the next round or the next year.”

The name Wifi Routers has a silly story behind it. While the name is as random as it sounds, it gets the job done.

“We had no idea what to name our team. And then I just had a prior conversation about who actually sells WiFi routers,” Hu said. “We postulated that they were either sold separately or they came with sort of the application of WiFi from larger businesses such as AT&T. And then it just sort of came up as the name.”