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Health & Fitness

Peekskill Students Win Business Skills Olympics' Gold Cup

Last year when a group of Peekskill High School students went to the Annual Business Skills Olympics, an event sponsored by African American Men of Westchester (AAMW),  the team lost by one point. This year, the student’s returned to the competition on November 15 determined to win, and they did just that. Out of 17 schools from across Westchester County that participated in this year’s event, Peekskill’s students came in first place, winning the 2013 Business Skills Olympics’ Gold Cup for their ideas regarding Twitter’s recent Initial Public Offerings (IPO) debut.

“I had students who came up to me earlier this year and told me, ‘We’ve got to go back and win this,’” said Assistant Principal Kent Picou, who is one of the group’s faculty advisors. “When the time came for the kids to present on stage, they were fantastic. Literally fantastic.”

This year’s PHS team was made up of five seniors, one junior and three sophomores. Together the students traveled to the Morgan Stanley business offices in Purchase, NY where this year’s competition was held. Having been presented with the competition’s case study topic only a few days before, students worked with business coaches and executives from Morgan Stanley for four hours to develop a 15 minute presentation.  Faculty advisors from Peekskill were not allowed into the room while students were developing their presentations.

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“They would come out of the planning room and give us thumbs up, saying, ‘We’ve got this,’” Picou said.

Peekskill’s ideas on how to revamp the current Twitter system and increase user capacity included suggestions such as scaffolding memberships to generate money for the social network, as well as special corporate and charity account options to help support businesses and build audiences.

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“They’re really tech savvy and their ideas were very good,” said Peekskill’s Social Studies Department Chair, Sharon Cummings, who co-advises the students with Picou.

“We definitely had an A-team,” Picou said. “The kids were so spontaneous and they really owned their presentation. Everyone played an integral role in the presentation. You wouldn’t have even thought you were listening to high schoolers, you’d have thought you were listening to business execs.”

While representatives from Twitter were not in attendance at the Business Skills Olympics, Peekskill High School Principal, Fred Hutchinson has reached out to the company to present the students’ suggestions to Twitter via a conference call in the near future.

As a reward for their victory, each Peekskill student who participated in the competition was awarded a Kindle Fire. Students and their families will also be treated to an upcoming celebratory dinner where medals will be awarded to the students as well.  The competition’s coveted Gold Cup will also be presented to the students at this time and will then be added to the school’s trophy case at PHS.

“To see a victory of this kind is very exciting for the school,” Hutchinson said. “To see the excitement that the kids had when they returned from the competition was very exciting for me as a principal.”

“I am extraordinarily proud of the students who applied their real-world tech experience to a Business Olympics case study on Twitter,” Cummings said. “They proved that they can analyze, organize and present information in a professional setting. It was one of the best moments in teaching, and in life, that we all hope to experience.”

 

 

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