MVHS clubs compete around California during the spring season
MVHS DECA attended the California State Career Development Conference from Thursday, Feb. 27 to Sunday, March 2 in Anaheim, Calif. Throughout the conference, over half of the members qualified for the 2025 International Career Development Conference, which will be held in late April.
The conference is an annual event where various DECA clubs in California compete, attend workshops and explore networking opportunities. The main competition is structured into two sections. First, students take a test in their career cluster, which can include Marketing, Finance, Business Management and Administration and Hospitality and Tourism. Following the test, members then participate in a roleplay, where they are given a real-world business scenario or case study and are expected to come up with a solution within ten minutes.
Junior and DECA Director of Finance Siddharth Kambhampati participated in the Personal Financial Literacy cluster and qualified for ICDC. He believes that DECA’s success was mainly due to its members’ continuous test preparation, along with the mock role-plays that were conducted some weeks before the competition.
“The thing that we were lacking the most last year was having freshmen qualify for ICDC,” Kambhampati said. “We’re really proud that most of the freshmen qualified for ICDC this year because it comes down to us teaching them at the end. I think it was because our coaching was more effective, which led them to perform better at states.”
Apart from scoring well overall, Kambhampati also believes that the competition provided the club members with a fun bonding opportunity. He also hopes that with the continuous efforts of the officer team and the members, DECA will be able to score well at ICDC.
“I was really happy when they announced the results,” Kambhampati said. “If you look at my camera roll, I have videos of every single one of my members who qualified for ICDC. Everyone was screaming their lungs out, it was just really amazing.”
The MVHS Robotics team attended the 2025 FIRST Robotics Competition Pinnacles Regional at Hollister High School from Thursday, Feb. 27 to Sunday, March 2, placing 31st out of 35 teams. The event is an annual competition between California high school robotics teams, individuals and professionals to solve engineering design problems.
Sophomore Anna Zhang believes that the team’s placement in the competition was mainly due to the robot malfunctioning both before and during the competition. A malfunction in the gyro that is in charge of following directional commands caused delays in the robot’s movements and resulted in their inefficiencies during competition planning.
“There were just a bunch of other things that happened every match,” Zhang said. “Like when we’re walking, something just breaks on the way. We also didn’t have an automator — which is a hardware and software that performs certain preset instructions — before we went, so we kind of just coded the automator over there.”
Despite the unexpected outcome, Zhang believes that the team will definitely learn from their mistakes and improve their performance during their next competition. Additionally, Zhang also says that she aims to learn from other officers to enhance her ability to aid the team in the future during preparation for tournaments.
“We’ve already added new subsystems to our robot, like changing the ramp and adding a vision to increase its efficiency and accuracy,” Zhang said. “I hope that in these next few competitions, I will become more involved with the team to learn more in general about how these robots are built, and hopefully get the opportunity to learn how to carry out a team such as creating CAD (Computer-Aided Designs) models for the robots.”
On Saturday, March 8, MVHS Science Olympiad placed first out of 46 teams in the Science Olympiad Santa Clara County Regionals. The team prepared for this competition with study sessions and practice tests one or two times a week and will progress to the Northern California State Tournament on Saturday, April 8.
Science Olympiad competitions consist of team events based on fields ranging from biology and chemistry to physics. Competitors typically participate in pairs in study-based, building-based or lab events.
Senior and Vice President of External Affairs Maya Pullara, who placed first in the Codebusters event, believes that the competition turned out well due to the practice sessions, and provided the team with a lot of bonding experience through team rituals and traditions.
“Every single time at the end of an event, before the award ceremonies, we have these stuffed animals we bring,” Pullara said. “We form a prayer circle where we put all of our medals onto the plushies, and then we put it in the center, and we all hold hands, praying to the Science Olympiad gods that we win.”
Pullara also says that the team’s perseverance and teamwork ultimately helped them win first place, even though Science Olympiad competitions have become more competitive throughout the years.
“Science Olympiad is a very team based event, so there’s no one moment that makes or breaks it,” Pullara said. “For a lot of other competitions that involve both individual and team events, you can mess something up here and there, but Science Olympiad is a competition that really depends on the team’s collective efforts.”
MVHS Research Club participated at the Synopsys Science Fair and Technology Championship on Wednesday, March 12 and Thursday, March 13. The Synopsys Championship is an annual fair that features research by students from grades six to 12 in Santa Clara County. Participants can register for both team and individual events, and many clubs and competitors start preparing for the fair six to eight months in advance.
MVHS Research Club members started preparing for Synopsys around October when members first pitched their ideas. Over the following months, they created prototypes and practiced their presentations in front of other members before the competition. For instance, sophomore Eliana Lee’s project was centered around dopamine research and the impacts of Korean Red Ginseng on decreasing oxidative stress through fruit flies to delay the impact of Parkinson’s disease. Lee says the competition went better than her team had anticipated and believes that it allowed her to gain a lot of insight into research.
“I remember just feeling really happy after learning that we had won an award,” Lee said. “After we got the email notifying us, I was just texting everyone, like ‘Oh, we finally got in!’ as I originally was not expecting too much.”
Sophomore Catherine Zhang also says that she felt shocked after hearing the results, and believes that she and her team were able to gain a lot of hands-on and learning experience through this project. She also says that in the future, she hopes that her project can be used to aid research beyond the classrooms to a larger audience.
“The competition required a lot of teamwork, which I found really enjoyable,” Zhang said. “It was really fun because we got to see everything in motion. Even though the preparation of the competition was a time crunch in some ways and the judges asked some questions that seemed a little bit out of the box, we still ended up being able to finish the project up nicely.”
