Science Olympiad at COD

In high school my friends and I were perennial participants in Science Olympiad, a national organization dedicated to getting students engaged with science and engineering. Having won several medals at both the regional and state levels and enjoyed nearly every minute with my team in and out of competition, I have since tried to help out with SciOly competitions nearly every year since graduating.

My specialty was the big-ticket biology events, namely Cell Biology (basically general biology), and Designer Genes (genetics/genomics), and I've been privileged to write tests for these events for both North Carolina and Illinois competitions. This year I wrote a Cell Bio test for the Illinois regional tournament held at the College of DuPage (COD). I find it tougher each year to write an age- and skill-appropriate test, though I think I did pretty well this time. The highest percentage result I had on the Designer Genes test I wrote two years ago was 60% from NCSSM (an elite, nationally-ranked science and math school for 11th and 12th graders). Those numbers are slightly worse than what you see on graduate exams! This time my highest was right around 80% while the lowest was about 25%.

It's interesting to interact with science-oriented high schoolers after so long. I'm always amazed by the great range in knowledge there is. I heard one student from a team exclaim confidently that while the cell they identified was from a plant it was definitely prokaryotic too. I just smiled and tried not to laugh. I put some tough questions on there that I didn't really expect anyone to get right, but some were total gimmies. I just wish I had a copy of the exams I took so that I could try to make mine as fair and reasonable as possible. Maybe next year...

I didn't attend the tournament alone. Kevin drove me and Nikhil (a housemate) there and we met up with Yan, another material sciences student at NU who went to UC as an undergrad (a connection to each of us!) While those three managed the Chemistry Lab event (which Kevin also wrote), I handled Cell Bio mostly on my own (they helped set up and brought me pizza for lunch). Overall we had a pretty good time, though I have to say our location in NC (Garner High School) was much better.

After getting all of scores in (and checking them twice) we left around four. It was an odd time between lunch and dinner and we were kinda hungry but unable to pick a place to eat, despite my GPS giving lots of choices. I missed a Culver's and couldn't find another, so we settled for Baskin Robbins. Turns out the one the GPS pointed us to was in a mall, so we ended up getting different choices from a food court to make everyone happy. For a poor economy and a late Saturday afternoon the place was absolutely packed. We made it back to Hyde Park around 6 where I caught up a bit with Bonnie and Jeffrey before messing around on my computer. Great day!