The Science Olympiad team performed excellently at a competition on Feb. 24 at Northwestern University and at the regional competition on March 2, where they placed second overall and qualified for the state competition in April.
Despite facing some of their most competitive rival schools, Stevenson High School and New Trier High School, the team placed highly in nearly all events.
“I’ve got to say that probably 20 out of the 23 events or something like that, we were getting first, second, third, fourth,” senior Zoe Nathwani, one of the team captains, said.
If the team places within the top two in this next competition, they will qualify for nationals, something that the team has never accomplished before. However, Zoe has high hopes for this year’s competition.
“We’re so proud of where our team has gotten to. This is probably the closest that we’ve ever been to making nationals,” Zoe said. “Our team came out of regionals super motivated. We have a real chance at making this next competition, and even if we don’t make it to nationals, we think we’re gonna perform really highly at state.”
While every member of the team participated in the last two competitions, only varsity will be participating in the state competition, with five junior varsity alternates. According to Zoe, the team captains try to have as many members as possible of the junior varsity team competing and practicing for the state competition the following year.
The team has been preparing for these competitions for months with after school practices and individual studying.
“The push in between our last invitational, which was in late January to now, was really, really hard,” Zoe said. “So we always set out goals for each different type of event. Like if it’s a study of that, we say teams should be taking a certain number of practice tests leading up to it. A certain amount of pages of notes are needed. For the lab events, we made sure that people were practicing.”
