Jayden Allen
From Monday, October 12, to Tuesday, October 13, the Beta officers, seniors Georgia-Claire Willoughby, Talha Ata, Preslee Clay, Kunj Patel, Gana Alababseh, and Nelson Showalter, along with juniors Sharon Li, Mariana Escobar, and Isabelle Delgiorno, competed in multiple events at the 2026–2027 Beta Leadership Conference Summit at Great Wolf Lodge in Concord, North Carolina.
The summit included multi-day leadership training, hands-on Beta training with national staff, collaborative team challenges, and networking opportunities for sponsors and members.
Seniors Nelson Showalter, Talha Ata, Georgia-Claire Willoughby, Kunj Patel, and Preslee Clay competed in The World Is a Stage. In this competition, they acted out a scene from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Senior Nelson Showalter described the experience as “a pretty funny situation, as [he] felt that [they] were bad at acting.” He and the others spent their time rehearsing their lines on the bus.
Seniors Nelson Showalter, Georgia Claire, and Talha Ata, along with juniors Sharon Lee and Mariana Escobar competed in a teamwork activity where their task was to use an elastic band with five strings tied to it to grab and stack cups into a tower in the shortest time they could. The officers came very close to completing the challenge and made it to the last cup, but one of the strings on the cups was pulled too hard, causing the tower to fall.
Still, Escobar described the cupstacking activity as one of the most fun experiences, saying, “We were all laughing at each other while doing it, and we made a moment that was a sad and funny experience of teamwork. I was so happy to see the support from my peers toward each other afterward.”