This past summer, Lukas Pluckhahn, senior, placed second in personal finance at the FBLA National Leadership Conference. FBLA is a business and career student organization focused on helping students explore potential career paths and develop their skills.
“There’s also fields [in FBLA] related to web design, graphic design, coding… it’s really not your stereotypical business organization,” said Pluckhahn.
Plukhahn was initially introduced to FBLA by his friend. Last year, he was a communications officer, and this year he is the club’s president.
“I came to the first meeting, and it was right up my alley because I was interested in business, so I decided to sign up for the executive board,” Pluckhahn said.
Plukhahn was the only competitor from Shorewood in the personal finance category, but was against 76 participants from other schools. However, there are numerous competitive events within the conference on a wide variety of topics.
“There’s roleplay events, presentation events, and objective tests,” Pluckhahn said. “A hundred different categories are split up across these three methods of competition.”
Preparation for Nationals was important to Pluckhahn, mainly due to the tough timing and the amount of preparation necessary to represent Shorewood to the best of his ability.
“I would have [AI] generate me problem sets for every single one of the 65 tasks until I was comfortable enough in that task to know that whatever question they threw my way I would be able to either know it or give a very educated guess,” Pluckahn said.
Pluckhan completed the personal finance objective test online in Anaheim, California, but he was also able to learn more about the activity and meet new people within the FBLA community.
“Although it’s a five day conference, the whole testing part is less than an hour,” Pluckhahn said. “The other stuff like workshops —where you can interact with your fellow members— is usually members of state or national leadership teams that lead the workshops.”
His positive experience at the conference helped him grow as a club officer, giving him new visions for the club this year as the president. He wants to share the experience of making it to Nationals with existing members of FBLA and new recruits.
“That kind of inspired me as the president to try to give my fellow FBLA members the same experience because being in a conference of over 10,000 people and being the only one from my school was kind of an interesting experience…. I think that it’s best experienced as a group,” Pluckhahn said.
Pluckhahn never would have expected to make it this far in FBLA. In the end, he credits his success to his dedication, and he is proud to have achieved something rewarding for himself within the club.
“A year ago when I didn’t even know what the organization was, I just join[ed] because of my friend who suggested I should. [I was able to] step on stage in front of thousands of people at Nationals,” Pluckhahn said. “It was great, and it felt like all my work paid off.”
As a new school year begins, Pluckhahn’s determination continues and he is ready to help club members achieve their goals this upcoming season.
“I’m hoping for 25 Shorewood qualifiers at Nationals,” Pluckhahn said.