Senior Ben Bourget placed eighth in the 2017 National High School Fall InvestWrite competition. Bourget also won first place in Massachusetts.

This essay competition is for students grades four through twelve, and the competition was broken up into grades four to five, six to eight and nine to twelve. InvestWrite offers a national competition to compete with other students of the same level across the country. Over 20,000 students across the country submit their essays for this competition.

Every year, the top students in WHS’ ICE class, or Investing in the Creative Economy, enter the essay competition to try and use the techniques they have learned in class to come up with the best possible answer. ICE goes through different units such as bonds, investing, the Stock Market Game and general knowledge about the economy. Teacher Frederick Lehmann picks the top ten essays from the class and submits them to the InvestWrite competition.

“It gives students a more solid foundation and a wider perspective to just interpret the world around them and be able to make decisions that will benefit them,” Lehmann said. “They can really understand that ‘these are my options at this point and time,’ [and that they need to] weigh the costs and benefits of what they look at as their top two choices and follow a course of action that will benefit them the most.”

This essay competition asked students to answer the question, “Imagine you volunteer at a nonprofit organization to manage their money, help it grow and protect it from risk. What would your nonprofit organization support and why is it important to you? How would you invest their money in stocks, bonds and mutual funds?”

According to Bourget, ICE has helped him advance his investing skills and stock market knowledge. When Bourget was assigned the prompt earlier in the school year, he began to brainstorm certain nonprofits and ways to invest. He eventually decided to pick ASPCA, or The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Bourget indicated he was surprised when informed that he won.

“I was kind of surprised when my paper was selected as top ten in the school and when I found out how well I did [on the state and national level],” Bourget said. “I was kind of in disbelief at first. It’s an awesome feeling.”

As Bourget is leaving high school and ICE behind, he hopes to take many of the skills he learned with his into the business world. Bourget noted that he hopes to continue his pursuit of business as a major in college.

Lehmann hopes that also students leaving ICE will remember lessons about the stock market and investing that he believes will be necessary for their futures.

“I hope that students leaving ICE will have a good fundamental understanding of how the economy works, and more specifically, that they will have the skills and motivation to start investing early,” Lehmann said.