Science Olympiad Wins States
By: Ellie-Ana Sperantsas, Catherine Wu, Andrew Yuan
The Exeter Science Olympiad team (SciOly) attended and won the 2021 New Hampshire Science Olympiad competition on March 27.
With this year’s victory, Exeter SciOly gained the opportunity to compete in this year’s USA National Science Olympiad competition on May 22.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 SciOly State and National competitions were both cancelled.
“States, which is the road to Nationals, got canceled. It was kind of disappointing, especially for our seniors,” senior and SciOly co-head Yunseo Choi said. “I think it also made us really want to make [nationals] the year after, because a lot of these in-person events were capped out.”
“Because last year the events were canceled, all the events were just kept through,” Choi continued. “This gave extra time for returning members to study for this coming year. Besides that, I think we did meetings online, and because a lot of this is studying, it was fine.”
“We technically started preparing for this competition [2021] last year,” lower Clark Wu said. “This definitely helped us as Exonians since some retention of the material could save us a lot of review time. We attended MIT, Harvard-Brown, and Princeton invitationals before competing at states.”
Prep Henry Yao explained the changes that occurred due to COVID-19. “In Science Olympiad, you have two types of events. You have a study event and you have a build event. In build events, we personally and actually build something and then we test it in the actual competition. So it's sort of a robotics competition. As for build events this year, they ran during States, but it was essentially a study event cause you can't really build anything. And because of that, build events are not running for nationals,” Yao said.
Members of SciOly shared fond memories from the competition.
“One thing I really love about competing in the Science Olympiad is how much everyone cares about each other. There were Dunkins and fruits for the morning competitions and after every test we’ll check in with each other. Since everyone takes three to four events, you have to fully trust everyone to put in their best. That trust I find very inspiring,” Wu said.
Yao shared his experience competing in the tournament. “For the States, since this year was online, it was pretty different from [the competitions] I’m used to in general. Something was fun that we just came together in the awards ceremony while talking in [Facebook] Messenger and waiting for the result was fun. Just watching the screen light up with our name as the first place was pretty exciting.”
“Shoutout to Albert Chu for showing up 20 mins late and still carrying. He made Nats twice in one day! Absolute god!” prep Achyuta Rajaram said. “I’m looking forward to competing, really. It was a goal of the team just to get to the Nationals.”
Senior Angela Liu reflected on the competition. “States is always an exciting experience since it's our biggest tournament of the year (other than Nationals, of course!), and this year was no different. It is a bit disappointing that my last State tournament was online, but it can't be helped. The highlight was definitely telling our graduated students that we made it this year!” she said.