On May 19, Science Olympiad competed at Nationals at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, placing 18th against 59 other teams.

“It is not as good as we would have liked,” said Science Olympiad Coach Alex Howe. “We had high expectations for ourselves after winning State for the second year in a row and we would have preferred to be in the top ten.”

Junior Asher Noel agreed, “The team has a lot of room for growth. Many of the events had the potential to perform much better than they did.”

Noel was among five students who took National Medals in their events. Junior Allison Liu, sophomore Irene Xu, junior Daniel Hess, and sophomore Jason Yuan also won National Medals.

Aside from Liu and Xu, top 15 finishers at Nationals included: freshman Eric Liu, freshman Pearl Shing-Roth, senior Faith Chen, junior Brandon Lee, senior Ilana Nazari, junior Edward Seol, junior Vikram Duvvur, senior Jojo Farina, and junior Jibriel Saqibuddin.

Though most of the team left Nationals disappointed with their overall ranking, they also left with lessons for future competitions.

“Going into next year, the team has to use this result as a motivator, along with our state championship, to work harder and break into the top ten again,” said Noel.

“Tough lessons on preparation, luck, fairness, etc. are inescapable parts of Science Olympiad, and life in general. We had plenty of these lessons on Saturday,” said Howe.

Science Olympiad returned from the State competition on Apr. 21 with a first place finish.

It took place at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,where New Trier received 92 points, placing them above 49 other teams.

The team competed in 28 events, and they went home with six first place medals, five second place medals, two third place medals, on fourth place medal, and three fifth place medals.

Allison Liu said “After State, I think most people were pretty confident that we were going to do well, especially since we beat our rival Stevenson.”

Regardless of the Nationals results, Liu claims the trip was worthwhile. “Personally I think that as long as you learned something, and I learned a ton about science this year, it was a worthwhile experience.”

Howe left Nationals with a positive feeling. “This team fostered life-long friendships, and the competition provided so many opportunities to grow our technical knowledge as well as to become better people.”