A few weeks ago, May 22nd to be precise, I woke up at 9am. This may not seem like much, but it was monumental. You see, May 22nd was a Thursday, meaning that I should have woken up at 6am so I could catch my bus at 7. May 22nd was different.
I started that day with fairly mundane activities. I had breakfast, worked out, laid in my bed contemplating life, etc. It felt like a normal Saturday, except two and a half hours after I woke up, I was sitting in the passenger seat of my dad's car as he drove me to the airport.
May 22nd was the day my Science Olympiad team and I departed for Nebraska to compete in the Nationals Science Olympiad tournament.
I had gone to Nationals once before. Last year, when I was in 7th grade, I went to Michigan for Nats in the 2024 season. Last year though, I went as an Alternate, this year I was an actual competitor.
I want to say that being an Alternate was a good experience, but it wasn't. I'm sure I had good moments, but the one thing I remember was one of my 'friends' forcing me to carry both hers and my other friend's backpacks since I did not have one of my own since I was not competing. Not only that, but she had the nerve to walk several yards in front of me, completely ignoring me as I carried HER backpack. I angrily texted my best friend about it afterwards, and she told me that she would have just left the backpacks on the floor and went on about her life. I should have thought of that, but my little people pleaser brain could never.
Now, I don't want to focus on last year, as this post is about this year. And, I do have to say that this year was a far better/more fun experience, in some ways at least.
I'll start with the more academic things, that are actually about you know... Science.
I realize I did not explain this earlier, but Science Olympiad is a team science competition, the team being your school. Since I am an Eighth grader, I participated in the Division B. (There are three Divisions, Div A for elementary school, Div B for middle school, and Div C for high school) Anyway, Science Olympiad has many events of difference science related topics, some of them are less sciency than others. (Cough, write it do it, cough) You participate in these events with a partner, although some events allow three people on a team.
Here is a description for my three events......................
Disease Detectives (My favorite): This event is primarily about Epidemiology, like... The CDC and stuff. Remember COVID, and all of the mask mandates, and methods of prevention were communicated. That is all part of an Epidemiologists job, even if it is just a fraction of what Epidemiologists actually do.
Microbe Mission: Basically microbiology. I learned about each of the types of microorganisms (microbes) as well as many diseases caused by such microbes. I also learned about fermentation and other processes microbes take part in, and the enzymes that assist them. Similarly, I learned about cultures, and DNA replication.
Last, and my least favorite event.
Mission Possible: Some people may love this event, but I certainly do not. My partner and I had to build a series of contraptions so that a stop sign would lift above our device. It is like a rube Goldberg machine. There was one more twist, for nationals, the event supervisors had to give us a time between 90 and 120 seconds, which was the total time the device had to run for. Yeah, this event was very difficult.
I had one more event during Regionals and Invitationals that was my favorite of all time.
Anatomy and Physiology: Every year, this event changes its three systems. This season, the systems were Integumentary, Muscular, and skeletal. We had to learn about each of the three systems.
I was really good at this event, and it was definitely the event I studied the most for. Unfortunately, since only one person from Mission possible made it onto the states team, and I had done Rollercoaster the previous year, I had to participate in Mission Possible while two of my other teammates got to do Anatomy. I am still upset about it, but I know my coach does everything for a reason.
Even so, I still study Anatomy materials so I can learn more.
This Nationals tournament was unlike any other for my school, in a bad way.
This was the first year my school did not make it to the top ten, and even worse, the rival school from our area beat us by four points.
During the awards ceremony, I heard many people from other schools whisper my school's name as the placements continued to be announced. They were confused about how we hadn't placed. This made me proud, even though we didn't get top ten, as even some really good schools knew about us. I had thought we were forgettable and just another no-name team, but having other teams think that we would get top ten felt really good.
I also really liked the tests that were given for my events. They were difficult, but they really made me and my partners think about the problems. I ended up placing top ten for two and top 15 for my third event. (I'm not telling which)
Right after the awards ceremony, since all the girls on our team were on the same floor in the dorms we were staying at. We all had a candy salad until 1am, it was very enjoyable. Except for when the boys came onto our floor and stole some of our candy... that was a little less enjoyable.
One thing that I didn't like from the otherwise very good dorms, was that the communal bathroom for our floor was closed from around 7-8 am, which is when we were supposed to wake up and use those bathrooms. To solve this, we all woke up at 5am each day in order to shower and get ready. We could have woken up at 6:00, but we thought everyone on our floor would have the same idea as us and wake up early, so we woke up earlier to beat the crowd. '
There was no crowd.
But it was nice that the bathrooms were otherwise empty when we used them.
I'm going to stop talking about bathrooms...
The UNebraska campus was very pretty. There were many brightly colored trees, and many of the small houses/buildings radiated old timey vibes, in a good way. There were a few buildings that were new, but they were really big and looked like a mix of futuristic and townish.
I really enjoyed my time at Nationals this year, and even though my team didn't do too well overall, I know we all learned a lot from this amazing experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment