On March 2, Lexington High School’s Science Olympiad (SciOly) team participated in the Massachusetts Science Olympiad States competition at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
“It was basically an entire day-long competition. And they had around six competing blocks,” Sishir Mahavadi, a senior and captain of the club, said. “SciOly is a partner-based and team-based science competition, with 23 different events in science, ranging from a variety of different topics like biology, physics, earth science, chemistry, and engineering.”
Only the A Team, consisting of 15 people, went to the competition in Boston, although the entire team is made up of a total of 45 people. At the state competition, the team placed second out of more than 50 other teams from all over Massachusetts.
“This was a good year for us. [The teams] have been a lot more balanced this year, which is nice. And at States, everything went pretty well,” Caroline Ehmann, a junior at LHS and member of SciOly, said.
Second place did not come easily, however. The team members spent a lot of time preparing for this competition.
“Each individual person has a different process because there are different events, but typically if you’re going to be doing a study event, that looks like meeting up with your partner once or twice a week, taking a bunch of tests, reading a bunch of textbooks, and redoing a lot of that. Build events look like meeting up in somebody’s garage to work with your partner to build your final design,” Stephanie Wan, a junior and captain of the Science Olympiad team, said.
In addition to the joy of winning second place at States, the captains expressed their pride at what their entire team was able to accomplish throughout the season as well.
“I’m pretty happy with the season as a whole because we did pretty well at almost all the other invitationals, and we mostly placed in the top three teams at almost all the invitationals that we competed in, including all sorts of national-level teams from various states across the country. So I think even though the state result wasn’t what we had hoped, I’m pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished over the course of the season,” Mahavadi said.
Although the team has accomplished a lot over the course of the season, the captains seek to make the club accessible to anyone interested in science, regardless of their experience.
“I think SciOly is a really beginner-friendly event. We have our tryouts at the beginning of the year and that’s when we decide who’s on the teams that compete, and I suggest studying a little bit earlier than our tryouts,” Wan said.
Overall, the captains and members who attended the States had similar takeaways from this competition and season in general.
“I think one of the biggest things is to know that things will not always go as you prepare or intend. And it’s important to be able to deal with circumstances that you might not have dealt with before. And not all things will work out as you might expect in the beginning. So you just have to take each tournament as an opportunity to learn,” Mahavadi said.
