The Science Olympiad team ended the season by placing fourth out of 27 teams at the Illinois State Competition, which took place at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign April 18.

Though this marks a second year of narrowly missing a qualification for the national competition, senior Mulan Wu, a fourth-year member of the team, said that this will only feed the group’s motivation to succeed.

“I think everyone came in at the beginning of the year ready to be even closer,” she said. “Even though we didn’t qualify, the motivation and drive were still there.”

Mulan and sophomore Mya Yao-Cowden placed first in the state in their forensics event, which Mulan attributed to their experience in the subject.

“For me personally, I think I got a lot of experience from being on forensics for four years, which contributed to our placement,” she said.

Other students who placed highly in their events were seniors Davin Moser and Ling Xie, second place in astronomy; juniors Ronen Malani and Giovanni Nicolai and sophomore Kate Stackert, third place in codebusters; and sophomores Liam Evans and Lena Jonas, third place in agricultural science.

Some of Mulan’s favorite aspects of Science Olympiad are the pre-competition rituals.

“It became kind of a tradition for some of our team members to go to this ramen place and have dinner and to meet with the rest of the team and get froyo after,” she said. “I got to talk to a lot of the other team members that I don’t usually talk to, and it was nice because that’s probably one of the last times I’ll talk to them at length.”