Roslyn High School senior David Garcia and a group of his fellow BOCES classmates were tasked with creating a viable business plan for the recent New York State SkillsUSA Leadership and Skills Championships in Syracuse.
So in their presentation, detailing a mobile phone application to help students prepare for exams in a variety of subjects, Garcia’s group pitched their bottom line: that a profit could be turned if they sold the program to educators and parents alike.
The judges bought the group’s concept and they took home first place in the entrepreneurship category.
“It felt amazing,” said Garcia, who attends computer game design and programming classes at BOCES’ Joseph M. Barry Career & Technical Educational Center. “I guess the judges felt we had the best business plan, that they saw the profits we saw.”
Having overcome the competition’s series of timed events and contests in leadership and professional development, Garcia’s group will move on to the National Leadership and Skills Conference in Louisville, Ky., where it will once again sell its mobile app.
“We just had to add an additional slide [to our PowerPoint presentation], and the rest is the same,” he said. “We plan to also cut down on the time. We had 10 minutes to present [in Syracuse] and we actually went over. We’re working on that now.”
Garcia will graduate from Roslyn next month and attend the State University of New York at Cobleskill, where he plans to study information technology.
“It’s an exciting time,” he said.
