Three Chapel Hill High School students won first place at the SkillsUSA state competition held in Greensboro from April 9-11 and will advance to nationals in Louisville, Kentucky in June.
Senior Dhruv Patel and junior Joseph Wilson won first place in Cybersecurity, and junior Isaac Rojas-Arreola took first place in Internetworking.
Four other students won medals: sophomore Bao Dinh and seniors Austin Kiziah, Colby Reeve and Jacob Huemmer.
A total of 21 Chapel Hill students competed at the conference.
SkillsUSA is a career and technical organization that provides training programs for more than 395,000 middle, high school and college students all around the United States. The programs contain local, regional, state and national competitions.
Wilson said he is hard at work preparing for the next stage of the competition.
“I’m certainly going to study more for the national conference, and I look forward to the trip,” Wilson said.
Chapel Hill has advanced to nationals in three of the last five years, SkillsUSA advisor Garrison Reid said. The students had to prepare for the competition themselves.
“It’s very student-dependent. Training takes place in the Career Technical Education courses. I’m a guide for getting the content to get to the competition,” Reid said.
SkillsUSA chaperone and computer finance teacher Jennifer Walker also assisted the students in preparation for the competition.
“I work directly with those competing in Internetworking, IT Services, and Cybersecurity. I have collected resources over the past few years and share those resources with the students,” Walker said.
Going into the competition, participants felt confident and well prepared, according to Patel.
To prepare for the competition, Patel “went through and read different cybersecurity concepts and technologies to learn how to implement them into a network and practice network design,” he said.
In the future, Patel plans to pursue a career in technology and will attend the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“I am passionate about cybersecurity, and I want to get a degree in either computer engineering or computer science,” Patel said.
