Novi Students Snag Top Awards At DECA

From Novi High School: Four Novi High School students were recently crowned national champions at the DECA International Career Development Conference in Anaheim, California. Senior Vivek Chinimilli, and juniors Aditya Chitta, Aditya Ravi and Nikhil Yadati earned first-place recognition at the four-day competition. Chinimilli and Chitta claimed first place for their presentation in Financial Services Team-Decision Making. Meanwhile, Ravi and Yadati won in the Hospitality Services Team-Decision Making category.“The tenacious work ethic, intrinsic motivation and fierce competitive spirit of these students attributes to their high level of success,” said Novi business teacher Jodi Forster, who has been advising the DECA chapter at Novi for the past 15 years.DECA is an organization of marketing and business students who compete in a variety of business and marketing related topics.

Novi students were among more than 19,000 students from around the U.S., Canada, and other countries to compete in this year’s event. It is the first time Novi has captured two highly-competitive DECA honors in the same year. Novi teams took home one first-place trophy each of the last two years. Novi High School’s DECA team had 38 of their 138 members qualify to compete in this year’s international event held at the Anaheim Convention Center.In addition to the first-place winners, Novi had two other top-10 finishers and seven more top-20 finishers.

Robert Xu finished in third place in his event, and Megana Deme and Jagjeet Wani earned finalist medals for placing in the top 10.Rounding out Novi’s strong top-20 finishers were: Christie Amalraj, Shreya Patil, Bella Khatib-Shahidi, Shradha Reddy, Zoe Ling, Edmund Shaheen, and Vamsi Chaparala. Teammates Nisarg Dharia and Aakash Jajoo earned medals for their high test scores.

Images Courtesy of Novi HS