The PRISMS Science Olympiad team had participated in four competitions in the 2018-19 school year with winning 17 medals in 12 events and a team trophy for the 4th place in the New Jersey Regional Science Olympiad.
Science Olympiad is the most popular science competition in North America that attracts over 7,000 teams and thousands of elementary, middle, and high schoolers all over the country. The competition consists of three regular levels hosted by the Science Olympiad organization: regional, state-level, and national; and another level hosted by famous universities such as Harvard and Princeton: invitational. Science Olympiad is a competition that needs not just teamwork, but also a tremendous amount of individual effort. Each team has at least 15 students, and they participate in 23 different events that involves subjects like physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, astronomy, engineering, cryptology etc. Each student needs to cooperate with one or two teammates depending on the events they participate in. Tests include written tests, performing lab experiments, and “impound” events that require participants to construct, test, and optimize before the competition. The team ranking is determined by the sum of all individual events where the team who has the lowest total sum wins the first place.
Although the PRISMS team faced significantly more difficulties than teams from bigger and older schools, such as limited number of students or lack of experience, we battled on, attended the New Jersey regional, the state final, and invitational tournaments including Harvard invitational and Princeton invitational, and won many top event medals and several team trophies.
Science Olympiad team roster (2019-2020):
Yufan “Melinda” Lu (team captain), Songtao “Barton” Li (team captain), Johan Kramer (team captain), Ziqi “Jack” Jiao (vice captain), Jingkai “Vincent” Hou, Jiale “Lucas” Lu, Ziyan “Yoyo” Zhong, Ziqi “Michael” Wang, Helena He, Yifan “Cameo” Jiang, Qianyi “Stephanie” Zhao, Hongyi “Albert” Jiang, He “Helen” Jiang, Qiyang “Young” Zhou, Eugene Gao, Ziqi “Nick” Han, Peize “Paddy” Liu, Jiaqi “Lucia” Lu, Zeqing “Richard” Li, Bokai “Berkeley” Liu, Jiasen “Jason” Liu, Tongyu “Steven” Lu, Ziqi “Edward” Shi, and Zhixin “Andy” Wang
List of prizes (2018-2019):
New Jersey Regional Science Olympiad - Camden County College
Harvard Science Olympiad
Princeton Science Olympiad
New Jersey State Final