Good Memories

[3nv1r0nm3ntal ch3m]

hahaha

[quizbowl]

My favorite moment has to be fossils at regionals. In the middle of one of the stations, we realized that our test was missing two pages and we couldn't answer the questions. We frantically called the supervisor and he gave us a new test. When that station's time ran out, he made everyone stop, and he gave us 90 seconds to transfer the answers. Everyone was stating as we crazily copied our answers. We barely finished in time for the next station.
At the medals ceremony, both my partner and I failed to medal in our previous events, and when they called fossils, I looked at her and we crossed our fingers. In 5th place was our second team, whom had received a copy of our notes from our binder. we were shocked; no one expected them to medal, and I originally thought that I was in 5th. 4th, 3rd places were called, and I began to give up hope. The judge said " Second place, Syosset team 1" and my team just exploded. My partner and I started jumping up and down like crazy and we ran up to the podium jubilantly. We were so happy!!

[zyzzyva980]

I had some bad memories from state this year- that's a different story. I did have some comical moments at both regionals and state. The two best moments would have to involved Experimental Design and Compute This.

At regionals, our team arrived at the Exp. Design room five minutes early, so we checked our supplies to make sure we had everything (there's another good story there, too). We get to the safety goggles, and one of the other teams waiting says, "Wait, we need goggles for this event?" There's a window on the door and you can see that it's obvious goggles will be required for this experiment. All the other teams snap into action, whipping out cell phones, sprinting to home rooms. Somehow, we were the only team that had brought safety goggles to the event.

At state, in Compute This, the printers were incredibly slow, so around the 45 minute mark, nearly every team was crowded around the printer. I was closest to the printer at the time, so I started handing out graphs and short answer questions to the teams that printed them off. I glance at some of the graphs and they are incredibly bad. In the rules, they say you need to have data table and graph on the same page, yet these students are printing them separately. The worst error, however, is that nearly every graph was a column graph, when it was clearly specified the graph was supposed to be a bar graph. Excel is an easy program to learn, especially the reading part. Right below "column" on the graph selection on Excel, there is an option labeled "bar."

We took first in both events.

[HappySciencePie]

Oh yeah, there was another really nice memory that didn't concern me at all from states.
On our team, two people were brothers this year. One of them was a ninth grader, and the other was a sevvie (a seventh grader; the Gelinas/Murphy Science Olympiad equivalent of a n00b) whose only event was Trajectory. The sad thing is, whenever I see them having a conversation, at least one of them is yelling at the other. The sevvie's always been talking about how he desperately wanted to medal in Trajectory, because he wanted to prove that he was just as good as his brother, or something like that. And so, at the award ceremony, when they said that we were in 5th place for Trajectory, the ninth grader ran up to the sevvie and hugged him, and they were both so happy. It was cute.

[sciolykid101]

I remember how much fun we had at states, even though my team didn't go to nationals and I thought it would be a good idea to have a thread to discuss all of your memories. feel free to discuss funny, emotional, or other good memories in this thread!

hey are u from charter?

[3nv1r0nm3ntal ch3m]

I remember how much fun we had at states, even though my team didn't go to nationals and I thought it would be a good idea to have a thread to discuss all of your memories. feel free to discuss funny, emotional, or other good memories in this thread!

hey are u from charter?

why were you wondering?

[blue cobra]

Ah, PSL at States. We had just given up on this event and wrote it off as a failure. I only spent an hour on my windmill, and neither of us really studied at all. We finished our test very quickly since we knew nearly nothing, and so just sat there in the room and talked for a while before our windmill was tested. We tested our windmill, and went on with the rest of our events. At the awards ceremony, we hear 6th, we hear 5th, we hear 4th, and suddenly it hits me that WE were 5th. I was laughing all the way up to get the medal

[zyzzyva980]

One of the best moments you can have is when you don't expect a medal and you win one anyway. Last year we were terrible at Road Scholar, then all of a sudden this year we ended up taking first at our last invitational, regional, and state. We were amazed at this. We were also shocked when we took third in DyPlan at state, because the test was crazy hard and was the same as last year, meaning participants from last year in DyPlan (not me) would have an unfair advantage. Somehow, we took third anyway.

[eta150]

Our greatest memory has got to be winning states for the first time in school history. I'll admit that after a 2nd place finish at regionals (first non-win in years) we thought we were seriously weak (although we were behind Strath Haven, a nationals academic powerhouse), and were convinced that first was out of reach, and 2nd was unlikely. We won the medal count at states, but we were sure we bombed some events. They got to 3rd place, and hear one of our rival schools name's called and were ridiculously excited. When Strath Haven was called, we absolutely erupted, as much out of happiness for their qualification as our probable victory. When they called us, it was a blur of screaming, jumping, and in some cases, sobbing in happiness. That is a day I'll remember forever.

Also, in response to pentathlon stories and unlikely medals, we nearly missed our pentathlon timeslot at regionals (that would have been really, really, bad), and then again at nationals. However, our Physics guy got formulas, our anatomy person got diseases, our dynamic planet person got rocks, and me, a pretty good scientific mind, got microscopes parts. The group got meteorology charts, which we all understood. We still had no idea how well we did, but when they called us in 4th, it was ridiculous.

[sciolykid101]

I remember how much fun we had at states, even though my team didn't go to nationals and I thought it would be a good idea to have a thread to discuss all of your memories. feel free to discuss funny, emotional, or other good memories in this thread!

hey are u from charter?

why were you wondering?

I used to live in DE. And I only know two schools, Charter and Dupont. DE fascinates me.