What’s Happening at the Hawai‘i Convention Center?”
Angel Alba | Maui High School, Class of 2026
On February 17–19, 2025, the Hawai‘i Convention Center hosted multiple events and workshops. Workshops hosted during this time provided useful information individuals could gain and utilize in their daily lives. Events hosted on these days were the State Leadership Conference (SLC) for HOSA, Family, Care and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA), Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA), Skills USA, Future Farmers of America (FFA), and more. During these events, they are tested to utilize their knowledge or resources to assist them in their subject. Meanwhile, other participants present their skills and knowledge in the category they selected or the group they are part of. Most participants underwent challenges along their way to achieve their goal, however, they fought through and were able to find their way past their challenges.
Dea Leen Asuncion is a student at Maui High School and a HOSA participant who attended the event at the Convention Center. She and her group took action to spread community awareness based on mental health, how it affects one’s daily life negatively, and how to manage it. Preparing for their competition was stressful for her: “I felt rushed and unorganized because we procrastinated! Instead of managing our time well, we kept pushing things back, which led to a stressful last-minute effort,” she stated. Procrastination was the biggest challenge for her group. She says, “It forced my group and I to do everything last minute and we did not prioritize our time to fix or refine our work as we should have.” Her team, however, was able to pull through by coming together and trying their best to put in all the effort they could before the day of their competition. If Dea had a chance to go back in time, she suggests, “I would manage my time and prioritize our project rather than waiting last minute.” Even though they did not place, they were able to experience what it was like competing and undergoing different tasks.
A student at Baldwin High School, Jobel Marcos, is a HOSA participant who attended the event at the Convention Center as well and placed third for PSA. His and his partner’s project’s main focus was creating a public service announcement (PSA) video they could showcase, based on Alzheimer’s disease, what it is like experiencing it, and ways to prevent it before it is too late. As Jobel was preparing for competitions, he did not feel as worried as he should have, because he had competed before, and it was not his first time going through the same process. Jobel did face certain challenges along his journey. “Trying to make the video engaging to our audience while informing the public about Alzheimer’s was hard,” he says. Furthermore, he explains, “It was also difficult because we wanted to get students involved in our video to make it more relevant to target our audience.” Baldwin had recently revived their HOSA club, yet Jobel and his partner were able to fulfill their achievement and energize their club by placing third in PSA.
Jaden Tonyokwe, a student at Maui High School, also participated in the event at the Convention Center. Jaden was a part of the FFA and competed in two events—commodity display and FFA essay. The main key of his project was to create a poster board and display certain subjects onto their board that they had already utilized in their original form. As for the FFA essay, competitors are assigned a topic once they reach their classroom and they need to complete an essay based on their topic. In preparing for the event, Jaden felt confident in himself, as he says, “I felt really confident for the essay because they would hand you the prompt and I would automatically know what to say.” He found his commodity display quite stressful, however, for it was his and his team’s first year competing in that category. Jaden felt challenged competing against other schools: “It felt intimidating, and the biggest challenge was to not overthink it.” That obstacle, however, did not weigh Jaden down; he was able to overcome that challenge by preventing that thought from taking over him.
Maui High School student Raven Bugtong and her group placed third for HOSA in community awareness. The main point of their project was to spread awareness about child maltreatment. In addition to their task, Raven states, “We wanted to shed light on the proximity of this topic to us, to the community; how it’s not recognized enough to be something we should as a group be looking out for and offering resources/guidance.” Her group had a gut feeling they were not prepared for their event. Still, during their progress in preparing, Raven felt amazed at their work, “reflecting back to how we’ve progressed from regionals, it ultimately made me proud,” she explains. Time is key and time management was the biggest challenge for their group. Her group was a mixture of juniors and seniors. “We were at the busiest time of high school so it was hard to find a common ground where we could all commit to doing more for our project.” Communication was applied to help her group come together and find certain ways to plan out their project.
Google® Is Not Everything … is a monthly column authored by high school students. The title of the column emphasizes education is more than just googling a topic. Google® is a registered trademark. This month’s guest columnist is Angel Alba, a Junior at Maui High School. She is a Cultural Representative of Maui High’s Filipino Cultural Club, a member of HOSA, Upward Bound and the Filipino folk-dance group “La Galería: Compañía Baile Filipino.” Angel is in the Nursing pathway at Maui High School and aspires to be a pediatric nurse. In her free time, she enjoys creating blogs, building Lego structures, going to the gym, spending time with family and friends, singing karaoke, and watching dramas or any type of movies that interest her. She is the daughter of Normalita Alba and Pablito Alba Jr.