Braden River High TSA president leads team to a state championship

Coming to the end of her run with the Technology Student Association is a lot more pleasant for Sheena Kurakula than the way she started.

Kurakula, a senior who serves as president of the Braden River High School Technology Student Association, joined the organization as a seventh grader in a time of distress. Her mother, Madhu Rao, was going through breast cancer at the time, which inspired her to join and do a project on cryotherapy versus chemotherapy. 

She joined TSA with the goal of helping people and changing lives.

“Little me that had so much hatred, and I had gone through so much,” Sheena Kurakula said. “I channeled all of that into creating a project that was research based.” 

Now she can channel her energy into winning TSA championships.

Kurakula and her Braden River High teammates won the Florida Technology Student Association at the DoubleTree Universal in Orlando on Feb. 19-22. Braden River TSA won event titles in Biotechnology Design II, Computer-Aided Design Engineering, Dragster Design II, Engineering Design II, and Promotional Design II.

Sheena Kurakula was the team lead of her school's engineering design project. Her team was given a prompt to manage the nitrogen cycle, and they 3D printed and created a working engineering prototype that would pick up all the excess nitrogen in water. 

Kurakula's younger brother Chaitanya Kurakula, a sophomore who is the current treasurer of TSA, is part of the team. He recalled how he originally was inspired by his sister to join the organization. 

“I'm like, 'Wow, this is something that she really cares about, and she's putting so much time toward it,'” Chaitanya Kurakula said. “Then, after seeing different events that piqued my interest, I joined.” 

The sister and brother (he was involved in an animatronics project) celebrated a state championship and now look forward to the nationals, June 27 through July 1, with their teammates at Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee.

“It's like this euphoric feeling when we all get to go up on stage and grab the trophy and walk together,” said Sheena Kurakula. “In fact, it was so euphoric that somebody actually jumped into the pool just to celebrate.”

Braden River High also earned second-place finishes in Board Game Design, Chapter Team II, Drone Challenge, Geospatial Technology, Photographic Technology II, and Transportation Modeling.

TSA is a career technical student organization that is almost completely run by students. Each TSA chapter enters a wide variety of categories in various competitions. Points are awarded in each category and that adds up and determines which organization wins the overall title, such as the state championship in Orlando.

Image courtesy of Sheena Kurakula

The Braden River High chapter consists of 50 people, and 46 attended the state conference. Thirty-eight of the students will attend the national conference in Nashville. 

Projects, or what members call events, range from highly technical endeavors like robotics and software development to more creative pursuits including fashion design, board games and children’s story writing. Graphic design and marketing are also areas that could be focused on. 

The Braden River High TSA members stressed that while there are plenty of STEM and science based events, anyone could join TSA. 

“We have almost everyone. I feel like everyone I know that has an interest could be fit into TSA whether they do art, designing clothes and stuff like that,” said Sriya Boggavarapu, the team lead of the animatronics project. “They have a place here.” 

Some events have specific prompts that are presented on the national TSA website.

“Even if you have a set prompt, you can interpret the prompt however you feel,” said Chaitanya Kurakula. 

This year the prompt for animatronics was to build an exhibit to excite young readers. Boggavarapu, Chaitanya Kurakula and secretary Riley Harris were a team for the project. 

Harris said she loves stories, and that is what attracted her to the events she is involved in: board games, children's stories and animatronics. 

“This year we did Alice in Wonderland, which is a literal story that we brought to life,” Harris said. 

Boggavarapu is involved in multiple events including board games, which focuses heavily on aesthetics and debate, which is public speaking. She said that the interview practice and presentation has improved her skill set for the future. 

She said her greatest lessons in high school that will apply to her future came from TSA.

Sheena Kurakula said that what sets their TSA chapter apart from others and helps them win is that everyone is involved in every project. Even though students are assigned to different projects, it is never just those couple of people working on their own. 

Braden River High School has a reputation for winning awards in TSA, but Sheena Kurakula said that is not the main goal. She said they don't think about the competitors.

“We're all doing these little projects that we're passionate about, and it's so authentic. It's just the passion that we're really going up against,” Sheena Kurakula said. “We're only thinking about ourselves because we're wanting to beat ourselves and just immerse ourselves into our topics.”

Sheena Kurakula said that it is important for members of TSA to put more work and effort into their events between competitions, especially if it didn’t do so well. She said they try to look at them objectively. 

“We just went up against all of Florida, but now we're going up against the whole country,” Sheena Kurakula said. “We try to grade ourselves on the rubric and try to see what we can do better during this time.”

“We're all a little anxious (about nationals)," she said. "We're all a little antsy, but it's exciting because we're doing it together.”