After around two and a half months of planning, hundreds of hours spent perfecting documents and reaching out to organizations, the day had finally come. The competitors gathered together in the lecture hall, chatting and doing their last-minute reviews before the testing and events began.

Every year in March, HOSA has the State Leadership Conference, an event where students participate in competitive events to potentially qualify for an international competition. However, having just this one event meant there were very few opportunities to compete, until senior Gowtham Sathi suggested the idea of hosting a district-level competition.

“I’ve had the idea a few times, and we’ve talked about it during our leadership meetings, but it never really materialized until this year. We have a second leadership team called the HOSA Chairs. Usually, we just have an officer team, and now with more leadership, we thought we would be able to make this event happen,” Sathi said.

The Inaugural District Leadership Conference, or DLC, was hosted at MN, and invited students from each of the district’s three HOSA chapters to participate in an event similar to State. The whole event was primarily organized and led by the students, with some help from HOSA sponsor Christina Preuss.

“Our leadership team of officers and chairs quickly mobilized and wrote tests, planned the entire competition, organized sponsors and guest speakers, and organized colleges to come speak at the event too, and literally made the entire event possible,” Preuss said.

Despite having a limited number of participants due to the event being scheduled on the same weekend as events for Forensics and DECA, the conference got more than 60 competitors. Events included tests relating to medical topics and Health Professions Events, where they could showcase their hands-on skills, and they could participate in as many events as they liked.

“There’s everything from competing in biomedical debates to developing a new piece of medical equipment and making a mockup of how it might work, or completing a skills assessment on an actual patient like a CNA would do, and a lot more. There are so many different events that they can compete in that they truly get to pick things that interest them,” Preuss said.

Once the events began, the leadership teams from each of the chapters served as judges and monitored events, making sure that everything went according to plan.

“We never had any major hiccups or anything like that. It was just minor stuff that we were able to fix on the fly, so I think it went really well in terms of how smoothly it went, considering how big it was, and it was our first time,” Sathi said.

Having these events before state also allowed the students to get a better expectation of what a competition may look like. Even returning members like senior Angela Cui, who had competed at the International Leadership Conference in the past, noticed the benefits of having an additional event around the corner.

“Because it is a little earlier, [the participants] might not be as prepared, but it’s good just that they’re thinking about it because in the past I wouldn’t think about it until, like, February, and that’s not good. So just having them remember that HOSA’s coming around and having them prepared [is good],” Cui said.

In addition, the DLC gives competitors more motivation to succeed, as performing well there can increase their odds of earning one of the team’s limited spots at State.

“I think that it might get more competitive because in the past, at least in our state, HOSA is not too competitive; you don’t have to live and breathe it. But just knowing that more people are having that practice under their belt and probably just getting a placement and knowing where they stand can motivate some people,” Cui said.

After the success of the DLC, HOSA’s leaders have already agreed to bring back the event next year. Even if many of the seniors who helped plan it won’t be returning next year, they still have high hopes for the event expanding in the future.

“We called it the Inaugural HOSA Millard District Leadership conference for a reason; we wanted it to be a yearly thing. A lot of the leadership who are currently juniors and sophomores definitely saw what we actually did and how much planning we had to go into, and I think they learned a lot from it too,” Sathi said. “Now that we have a foundation set up, it’s going to be a lot easier to build off and then grow from here.”