SkillsUSA from the student perspective

By Emma Peterson. 

Three students from Oregon share their SkillsUSA experiences and stories. 

This year, Lauren White, editor of The Coffee Shops™, had the opportunity to attend the 2026 Oregon SkillsUSA state competition. SkillsUSA competitions are fundamental and valuable opportunities for supporting the next generation of tradespeople as they grow their skillsets and understandings of their chosen trades.  Seeing leading professional organizations, like the National Roofing Contractors Association, getting involved is also exciting, as having such support from industry leaders for these future tradespeople gives many confidence in what’s to come.  

This year, Oregon’s state competition was held over the course of two days in April (4/10/26 and 4/11/26) at the Knife River Training Facility in Albany. While there, Lauren talked to three of the students competing: Akshara Dashputre, Theron Tyler and Gayathri Devarapu. Both Akshara and Gayathri are sophomores at the Beaverton Academy of Science and Engineering. As for Theron, he's a senior at Henley High School and is heading to the Oregon Institute of Technology with plans to study mechanical engineering this fall.  

At this year’s competition, Gayathri competed in three events: related technical math, cake decorating and prepared speech. She shared her thoughts about the experience, saying, “Technical math was probably my best event this year because I got to take the test online at school two or three weeks ago. For the other two, they were both at 9 a.m. this morning. So, I had to rush around a bit, but it was really fun.”  

As for Akshara, she competed in computer programming and prepared speech. The former is tied directly to what she is interested in pursuing in the future. She explained, “I wanted to do something involving computer science or cybersecurity related. And so, in this competition, we were given a project that we had to develop and I was able to kind of test my skills that I've already developed over a period of time.” As for the prepared speech competition, Akshara was just excited to talk about her passions. She shared, “The national theme for this year is Champion Your Future. And we had to create a five to seven-minute speech on what that theme means to us and how SkillsUSA ties into it. And that was an exciting event because I got to talk about how passionate I am about SkillsUSA. And writing that speech wasn't just for a competitive event. It was also for me to kind of reflect on my journey so far and what this event really helped me to do.” 

And last but not least, Theron competed in technical drafting and engineering technology design at this year’s competition. Both of these events are quite in depth, as Theron explained:   

For technical drafting, we were given a packet with multiple parts that we had to design, and then we had to follow all the industry professional technical standards and redesigned those parts in a CAD software, computer-aided design. Then we took our CAD model, and then we created a technical drawing that follows all the engineering standards. As for the engineering technology design, we’ve been working on a project for that since December and were even working on it in the hotel on this trip. 

Overall, all three of these students showed off incredible work and dedication at the competition. And while they were competing in mostly different events, they have one thing in common – they are all part of the SkillsUSA Oregon state officer team. Theron is the president for secondary education, Akshara is VP of social media and Gayathri is the reporter. Reflecting on their positions, the sentiment was all excitement and thankfulness. As Gayathri explained, “On our team of 12, we all do a mix of everything. For example, I helped with our community service project with Make-A-Wish and the other day I helped Akshara over here with some Instagram posts. It’s a lot of great experiences and I’m really glad to be a part of it.”  

Want to hear more from these amazing students? Check out Lauren’s full interview with them on the RoofersCoffeeShop YouTube channel!