Nationals #1

So for the past two years I’ve been able to go to National Science Olympiad. The first one I attended was in Atlanta, Georgia and the second one was in Champaign- Urbana, Illinois.

A little background…
My brother joined Fairfield’s Science Olympiad in its prime. Almost the whole school would come to try out. Like a good little sister, I went and watched the awards assembly and attended the ice cream party afterwards. Even in third grade I knew this was something I wanted to do.
In seventh grade I tried out for Science Olympiad. I showed up on Halloween and took the hardest test of my life. The test consisted of part of the science ACT practice test I think, and a 9th grade end of level test. The best analogy I’ve heard to explain the test is-
“You see how well you’ve learned to guess.”
A few months after this when I’m at my grandparents house, Matt called me and told me that Mr. Erickson needed me to compete at Nationals for a few events. It was a very lucky thing that there was no hole in the roof.
So I got to compete in Nationals in Georgia. But due to a prior conflict, I didn’t get to fly out with the team. We stayed at one of the team members Aunt and Uncle’s house for the first night (they had the cutest dogs!). The houses in Georgia are so cool!!! If you have ever seen Gone with the Wind, they really are that big and magnificent. In fact my mother sat and talked to the aunt (who was so nice to us) about Gone with the Wind. I had always thought my mom was nuts because she liked the book and the movie so much, but now that I’ve read and seen the movie, I share the madness. The next morning we got up around what would be 3:00 A.M here and started out to meet the team at a Science Museum. Something I thought was interesting was that the roads in Georgia hardly have any billboards because there are huge trees, and thick bushes that grow along the side of the road.
Science museums are my favorite part about Nationals. Every year we get to go to the most incredible museums! We had TONS of fun at this one! Then came the dreaded competition, I had the first event because Bottle Rockets was on Friday instead of Saturday. (That was probably my favorite event.) Basically for a National Competition they stick you on a college campus give you a home room, and amongst your events you can wander about and explore the campus. My second event was Wright Stuff. It wasn’t very wonderful. Wright Stuff is when you fly a plane that is made out of balsa wood and has an elastic motor (there are more details than just that though). Because it is a “building event” you are allowed time to test fly your plane, only ours wasn’t working. Melanie, my partner couldn’t come to the test flight with me because she had an event running right through the time. So Kyle came to save the day and helped me until he had to go work on his event called “Scrambler”. (All through this time no coaches are allowed in the gym) Finally, in a state of panic I left and told my mom what was going on, then we told Mr. Erickson and for an hour we went into a lobby and flew the plane until it was working better. Yay! (It didn’t fly to well when we were competing, but we had put the whole thing together in a month, which makes it a miracle it could even fly…) Next came Science Crime Busters- solve a crime and clean up all in 50 minutes! Melanie was my partner again and we had some very serious goggle lines by the end of the competition, which resulted in some very cute pictures. My goggles kept fogging up during the competition due to the humidity though, and though that was annoying the day ended up fairly positive. We partied, had the awards assembly, had a lovely meal, and I got to go home and have my birthday! It was a great week!