MSJ Deca offers professional business insight at guest speaker event

By Staff Writers Amy Han & Veer Mahajan

MSJ DECA, a business and entrepreneurship club, hosted a guest speaker event on October 29. Students had the opportunity to learn about leadership and real-world business impact Los Angeles-based Entrepreneur Erika Brechtel and UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business Professor Frank Schultz at the C120 auditorium through a projected video call. The guest speakers shared insights about leadership, business, and growth, leaving attendees with a memorable learning experience. 

MSJ DECA has been hosting guest speaker events for the past few years as a part of its mission to inspire and motivate the next generation of student entrepreneurs. These events often feature California-based business owners, educators, or business students. This is the second year the club has featured Brechtel and Schultz. “It’s always really helpful for MSJ students to meet people outside the high school realm, whether it be college students, college professors or even business professionals … to know the mindset that you might want to have going into the professional or business world,” MSJ DECA Director of Education Junior Owen Tsai said.

The majority of the more than 180 attendees were MSJ DECA Career and Technical Education (CTE) members and freshmen Spark members. Brechtel and Schultz answered student inquiries about business careers, essential marketing strategies, passion-finding, and overcoming challenges. For each question, the two gave their own insights, with Brechtel applying her real-world experience and Schultz integrating his educator background in his answers. “They offered a lot of real world advice, as well as their own experiences of challenges, from ups and downs to how to start a business … and it really helped in solidifying my understanding of how to [start] a business,” Sophomore MSJ DECA CTE Member Megan Ng said.

Through their responses, Brechtel and Schultz emphasized the value of self discovery, connecting to personal passions, overcoming failure, and developing effective communication skills, expanding the business-centered event to a more general audience. “We’ve had some different experiences and more experiences in our life, so I think we were just trying to share some additional perspectives that you might not get elsewhere, and they tend to be general things, but at a high level, useful things that … we’ve experienced,” Schultz said. 

The event served as an opportunity for students to learn from field experts. Attendees like MSJ DECA CTE Member Sophomore Aashi Goel said they left the session with a clearer understanding of real-world business success and the intersection of passion and strategy. “I think the event, even without the DECA exposure, was still a really nice event, because … [it] provided a lot of insight,” Goel said.