Lexington High School students Morgan Wipke, Natalie Gibbons, and Gabriel Alves placed in the top ten of all submissions in the InvestWriteEssay contest, a biannual national writing competition. In the competition, contestants respond to a given prompt from The Stock Market Game, an educational simulation that offers students the chance to manage a hypothetical investment portfolio. Students at LHS taking the Honors Personal Finance course are required to participate in the contest.
Gabriel Alves, a junior, responded to the prompt: “If you had the opportunity to invest $10,000 in real life, what would you do with it?”
“I’d play it safe and whatnot and put it all into big ETFs [exchange-traded funds] and bonds to gain money over time,” Alves said.
Alves also inserted personal touches in his response, reflecting on key parts of his experience in The Stock Market Game.
“My essay was [also] about me, how it went, and why and why not I invest[ed] in certain things,” Alves remarked.
Participating in The Stock Market Game has allowed students to expand on previous knowledge and apply course content outside the classroom.
“Throughout my research in The Stock Market Game, I learned about the benefits of investing in different sectors of the market [and] different industries; and the difference that investing in different-size companies and different kinds of funds, stocks, [and] bonds can make depending on what your goals for investing are,” Natalie Gibbons, a junior, said.
Alves noted that one of the key challenges he faced occurred at the beginning of the writing process: deciding how to get started.
“I just didn’t really know how to start it. I ended up starting it with a short story about why I was interested in the subject, but I’d say that’s what I was back and forth on for a while. Persistence helped me push through,” Alves said.
Even students with minimal knowledge of the stock market have the opportunity to participate in the InvestWriteEssay contest.
“It’s all about what you’ve learned in the class, and I went into it … [with] a little bit of background knowledge about what the stock market was, but I was not an expert by any means,” Gibbons said. “All of what I used in my essay was stuff that I learned through the class and through my research for the Stock Market Game.”
Gibbons left a word of advice for those looking to participate in the contest.
“I would add a little more of a personal touch to my essay, instead of just … stating the facts,” Gibbons said. “How I can use the information in the future, and what impact I think the stock market, as a whole, can make on my life and other people’s lives.”
