“We were not ready for the carnage,” Science Olympiad president senior Ishaan Shah said at a lunch meeting.

On Jan. 9, Science Olympiad competed at invitationals at Mira Loma High School in Sacramento. However, because it was the first competition of the year, the members did not do as well as they hoped.

According to Shah, the invitational served as a wake up call for the members to push harder and prepare beforehand for their events seriously. Science Olympiad’s purple team, the team chosen to compete at invitationals, made several mistakes, most of which could’ve been prevented with a little more caution. Compared to last year, members feel like they were not as prepared this year.

Since invitationals, Shah and vice president junior Kush Shanker hope to implement several changes to encourage members to collaborate more.

“We did not have a lot of teamwork within our pairs for each event. We need to push them to give their absolute effort,” Shanker said. “That’s what’s going to ultimately get us to where we need to go.”  

Sophomore Grace Qing is part of the purple team and agrees with Shah and Shanker. One of the events that Qing participated in, Bridge Building, challenges a member to build a wooden bridge that can hold a certain weight while being as light as possible. However, they tested their bridges’ stabilities with a material different from the one used in the actual competition, causing the bridge to collapse during invitationals. Qing feels that if there had been more communication and preparation, their bridge might’ve held the weight.

“It came down to [the fact that] we didn’t have enough practice and we never realized how tough the competition was,” Qing said.

To ensure that mistakes like these will be prevented, both Shanker and Shah also want to mirror the testing situations at the competitions as closely as possible at the lunch meeting.

Other things they mentioned included the use of a research portal composed of different links that each member studied from, like an online study guide. They also encouraged and pushed all of the teams to meet at least once a week to catch up with their partners and study together. In the end, the goal is to organize a team good enough to get MVHS to the state competition.

“I feel like [MVHS] already has the potential and drive, they just need to apply it this club. That’s all we’re looking for,” Shanker said.