SkillsUSA members make quite the impression on April 18th at the state-wide Colorado SkillsUSA competition, winning top honors in their brackets.
Skills USA Winning Teams.
This past week Thomas Jefferson’s very own techno superstars competed at the Colorado SkillsUSA Competition at WarrenTech, the Career and Technical High School for Jeffco Public Schools. The competition hosted every skill from collision repair to interviewing. High school and college students from around the state spent the day – some events lasting up to eight hours – competing for a spot in the Nationals Competition.
To represent the school, TJ brought along two web design teams, three 3D teams, and 3 photographers. The competition lasted two days: the first day consisted of a guest speaker and a pre-qualifying test, used as a tiebreaker the next day. The second day was set aside for the main event, which began at 7:00 a.m. Altogether there were around 400 high school and college students from around the state. The 3D students were challenged to create an animation showing a person traveling up an elevator and walking into a room where they had a choice of themes: western, fantasy, size variation, or animated. For the Web design competition students were to take on the reconstruction of the Colorado SkillsUSA website. As a bonus prize, the winners have the opportunity to be involved with the actual reconstruction of the website.
After a long day of hard work and concentration, the students traveled to the Marriot Hotel where the winners were announced. Taking the cake for 3D was the duo of Talan Lousingont and Alysse Grywusiewicz. “Talan was a really helpful and knowledgeable partner who knew how to work with the characters well. Our animation’s angles and cinematography really set us above the rest. It was all very believable and seemed to come to life,” commented Grywusiewicz on her team’s win.
In second place came another TJ team consisting of Brody Bills and Van Diep. TJ also swept in the Web design competition placing first with the team of Daniel Scherer and Young Kim and second with Ali Holcomb and Mckenzie Brown. “The competition was incredibly stressful because there’s a lot of pressure to get everything done and do it well. The judges thought our website was structurally sound and the sections were well defined,” proudly remarked Brown.
Ryan Woods placed third in photography, “For our competition we had to take photographs that exemplified the SkillsUSA motto of ‘skills and dedication at work.’ We turned in 50 of our best and framed seven of them. I feel like my photographs followed the criteria best and showed the students really using their skills. Altogether it was a fun experience, but seven hours of editing was a little stressful,” Woods jokingly remarked.
In order to qualify for the competition the teams were required to place in the Regionals. “Regionals is our in-house competition. The students spend the day in their particular field creating a piece built around a certain assignment,” explained CCT Teacher and SkillsUSA advisor Jerry Esparza. There were ten teams of 3D and web design competitors and from that Esparza chose the lucky few to continue on.
The next step for these talented Spartans is Nationals. “Talan and Alysse really want to go but the cost is about $800 per student so we’re in the process of designing a plan to fundraise,” commented Esparza. If the students are able, they will be competing in Kansas City, Missouri in June against the country’s best. In this fast-paced, technology-based society it is key to have the skills these students have attained and therefore have very bright futures ahead of them, at nationals and beyond.
