Winning 1st place for both DP and Ento, my only two events, at Regionals this year. First year doing SciOly and was so nervous, multiple people tried to calm me down.
After that, our school won first overall at regionals, and the whole team just jumped up and started to yell, cheer, and scream. I felt like I was going to cry from nervousness and frustration, then I was going to cry from happiness... Overly dramatic, I know.
2016 Events: Invasive Species, Fossils, Write It Do It
In 2013 (my first year), we went up to the Wright State Invitational. I was irrationally nervous to the point of getting sick the day before. A 9th grader and I got put on one of the trial events, Invasive Species. I had spent two or three hours the day before throwing together stuff for a binder. It was my first event ever, and nobody on the team was expecting to medal. We ended up getting third place in Invasive Species! We lost only to Solon, and beat our rivals by one place . The only other medal our team got that day was 4th in Sounds of Music.
Last edited by Astroknight on April 6th, 2014, 8:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
TSA's pretty cool... i guess
2015 events:
Essays on Technology, Tech Bowl, Water Infrastructure, Website Design
2012 (second year C Division), I decided to pick up Forestry. One of my friends joined us and I (politely) coerced him into doing Forestry with me. We had a rather uneventful run throughout the year. Fast forward to States and we got first. It was amazing and I am still so sad that Forestry isn't a thing anymore.
If you can't explain it simply, you don't know it well enough. -Albert Einstein
It was at 2012 regionals, and our team had never gone to states before. Our school had never taken it too seriously, but we were beginning to figure out what it took to go to states. We were all so hopeful, and had a decent amount of medals around our necks as they called out the State teams. However they were calling the 3rd place winner and we were all sooo depressed. We knew we couldn't have gotten first or second on our first trip to States... and then they called our name for 2nd and I swear we were the loudest states scream of ALL time. I also got 1st in Experimental Design, 3rd in Microbe mission, and 5th in bottle rocket that year...so that was cool too
2014 Rustin Invitational: Entomology: 5th Experimental Design: 1st 2014 Regionals: Entomology: 3rd Meteorology: 2nd Experimental Design: 1st 2014 States: ??? Medal Count: 14 (Hoping for 15 after my last B-division States )
For me, it would have to be when I got 5th place at the Union County Regionals in New Jersey 2014. I had studied really hard for the test, having received 15th the previous year at states. As a result, I felt really disappointed, as I had gotten 8th at states two years ago and 6th at regionals the previous year. So, I worked extremely hard to do very well. However, as you guys all know, Astronomy is an extremely tough subject to master; lots of details to memorize and keep track of and lots of concepts to understand. In addition, apparently if there's one subject people at my school won't try out for, it's Astronomy. I don't know why. Astronomy is a very cool subject ad the math really isn't the hardest when you truly understand it. (Perhaps it was the complexity. Who knows?) Anyhow, most of the times my partners were partners who focused mainly on other events. Thus, I had to do a lot of the work. When we went to regionals that day, I was expecting to do extremely well. Then came the test. It turned out to have stuff from last year. I was thinking, "Where's my stuff from last year?" (I think I deleted those stuff or something like that. I will always remember never to do so in my life again. Or at least after I'm officially done with Division C.) I did the test as best as I could with my partner (who did, thankfully, study), but I didn't expect to do so well. What was even worse was when I looked up the test (which was actually from the test exchange (Virginia Regionals, if anyone's interested)), the score wasn't that impressive. So, not expecting anything extraordinary, I went about my business. Awards start. I have a little bit of anticipation, as if some distant part of my body thinks I'm going to do well, but perhaps that's just from me wanting JP Stevens (my school!) to do well. I record the event results on my computer. Astronomy comes. 6th: Not JP. 5th: JP. However, I keep thinking that it's going to be Team 2. Instead, it was TEAM 1! (I was part of Team 1) I had never expected to get such a medal that day. I was jumping up and down. I can definitely say that was my proudest moment.
John P. Stevens Class of 2015 (Go Hawks!)
Columbia University Class of 2019 (Go Lions!)
6th at Nationals in Food Science. Long story short, our coach did not exactly coach after Regionals but instead gave my partner and I a laptop to do research on. We had done a couple of experiments earlier in the year, like using baking soda instead of baking powder in cupcakes as well as our viscometer measurements. Having never competed at Nationals, both my partner and I were unsure of what was going to be on the test because we lacked guidance, so we made this huge binder of stuff with this 20-page section about amino acid, lipid, amine, and carb structures and a ton of other biochem stuff we did not entirely understand at the time. (One day, another teacher came in and saw our binder, and she commented that we were studying undergrad material, yet we were still unimpressed.) We studied in half hour intervals on the entire trip to Orlando as well as when we had free time in the dorms, the opening ceremony (I had to carry my study materials in the parade, and we only stopped to watch this clip of Stephen Hawking being autotuned), and during the swap meet. Food Science was our last event of the day, and it was obvious that the proctors were a bit exhausted. We went straight to a station, set our box down, and split the test. I was in charge of the lab components, and my partner did the MC. I opened my half of the test to find that the first question wanted us to write up one of our labs from the year. Since I did not remember where we put our data from the baking powder vs. baking soda experiment, I did everything else first. There was this one station where they wanted us to find the density of a piece of bread, and the tools available were scissors, a ruler, a circular cookie cutter, and a scale. Knowing that cutting the slice into a cylinder would make the measurement horrible, I took the scissors and cut out this little 1 cm^3 cube and put it on the scale. Pretty much everyone else in our testing group fell for the cookie cutter trap. Then, I did the other experiments, which I vaguely recall being a viscosity test and determining the type of macromolecule of an unknown using iodine, Benedict's, and Biuret (thanks Crime Busters!). Finally, I returned to my testing station and began the first question, searching for the pesky data. I found it on this one crumpled sheet in the very back of the binder, had a little party to myself, and transferred the data to the test along with a brief summary and conclusion (thanks ExpD!). And that evening, we medaled. Unfortunately, because our school had its charter pulled and was in the process of becoming private, the county came that summer and took our masterpiece of a binder for themselves.
Old fart who sort of did things sort of for some schools.
. The only other medal our team got that day was 4th in Sounds of Music.
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