It is 6:00 a.m. in the morning and a high school student runs into Walmart with two very different needs: PopTarts and black dress shoes. After a successful shopping trip, the student hurries back to his hotel to catch a bus. Even with all this chaos, this student and his team had an outstanding trip at the SkillsUSA conference.
SkillsUSA is a competition-based club with an emphasis on trade skills. Skills and competitive events include video editing, culinary arts, video game design and more. Green Hope’s SkillsUSA team competed from April 23 to April 25 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The team consisted of ten students ranging from freshmen to seniors.
One of the ten Green Hope students to compete was Roshan Shoukat (‘25), competing in advertising design due to his interest. Other topics selected by fellow falcons were Adobe Photoshop and CNC 3-Axis Design. Before the week of the competition, Shoukat stated “Many people watched YouTube videos, and practiced using Photoshop and other programs so they would be prepared for competition day.” The president of SkillsUSA, Valentina Garcia (‘24), noted that in addition to the people preparing individually, the club also met on Tuesdays and Thursdays in April to prepare as a team.
After the preparation leading up to the event, a team member ran into an issue the morning of the first day. Shoukat recalled, “I woke up at 5:30 because I needed to get black dress shoes… luckily Ms. Andrus took me to Walmart and I was able to make it back in time for the bus.” After this unexpected hiccup, Shoukat made it to Jamestown, NC to begin his advertising design task. As for Garcia’s event, she was able to stay close by. “The Adobe Video competition was in the Greensboro Coliseum, which was only ten minutes away from the hotel.”
With various tasks to complete for the advertising design event, Shoukat entered the room ready to perform. He said, “First I designed an advertisement based on the prompt they gave me using Illustrator. I then took an advertisement that they gave me on paper and recreated it on Photoshop.” After he finished the two activities, Shoukat felt confident about his performance. That was until he took the test. “After I took the test I thought I had failed and done miserably, but it ended up being alright.” He had done more than alright in his event, placing fifth in the state overall.
For Garcia, her Adobe Design event was structured a little bit differently from Shoukat’s. “For the first part of our event, I was given a prompt for what our video should be about. Included in the prompt were some restrictions like logos that we needed to include or sponsors that needed to appear in our video.” Being given three hours to complete the task, Garcia moved on to the second part. She stated, “After we finished the video, they gave us an hour break and then we moved on to the interview portion. The interview included questions about the video we created such as ‘What were some challenges you faced while editing’ and ‘What kind of effects and tools in Premiere Pro did you utilize?’” Garcia placed fourth in her event, making her among the best in the state competition.
After the three-day competition, Shoukat and Garcia both emphasized how much they enjoyed the experience, discussing the camaraderie among the team as one of the main reasons for their enjoyment.
