Science Olympiad team takes second place at regionals

On Feb. 17, 43 different teams from more than 20 schools arrived at Mount Hebron High School to attend the regional Maryland Science Olympiad. RM sent three teams to compete and performed extremely well overall, placing second place as a school.

The Science Olympiad competition is a team “sport” where 15 students work together on a team to participate in more than 20 events. Senior Siobhan Light, one of the captains of the Science Olympiad team said, “At RM, we have everyone in Science Olympiad join one of four study groups and everyone does on average 3-4 events.” These events draw from a variety of science topics and have many different requirements. Many groups worked together trying to complete build projects such as building a mousetrap vehicle, while other groups focused on studying for test events, such as Anatomy and Physiology.

Just two weeks prior, RM participated in the Maryland Invitationals competition at the University of Maryland College Park campus, where RM scored first place overall. “The Science Olympiad Invitationals was overall a great way to study for the real competition taking place at Mount Hebron. We learned valuable lessons at this competition. It’s also nice that we scored well!” junior Laura Yao said.

With all of this preparation, when it came to competition day, many students were looking forward to performing well in their topics. “I was extremely excited to participate in the regionals Science Olympiad,” sophomore Kyle Liao said. “I was overall pretty well prepared which made me less worried about the actual outcome of the competition.”

Other students enjoyed the social aspect of Science Olympiad more. With more than 20 schools present from around Montgomery County, many students were able to meet up with old friends. “A big part of Science Olympiad for me is meeting up with some of my friends from previous schools who I don’t see very much anymore,” senior Alan Tong said.

As the day concluded, hundreds of students crowded into the Mount Hebron High School auditorium for the awards ceremony. “My favorite part has got to be the awards ceremony, where we cheer each other on for our hard work during the season,” Tong said.

All in all, RM placed in 19 of the different events, and the A team placed second due to the collective performance in all of the events. Due to these results, RM will move on to compete in the state Science Olympiad tournament at Johns Hopkins University on March 30.  “This time, we will definitely be spending more time beforehand preparing for events so we don’t end up cramming everything last minute,” Light said.

In the future, the Science Olympiad Team hopes to work on allowing more students who are interested in the STEM fields to compete in this competition. “I really think Science Olympiad needs to work on diversity on inclusion,” Light adds. “We really are almost exclusively IB: the demographics don’t reflect the school.”