Science Olympiad Nationals Tournament 2025

Madison West High School placed seventh overall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln 2025 National tournament, beating our in-state rivals of Marquette!! There were numerous podium finishes in various events like a 3rd place in Air Trajectory, 2nd in Fossils, and a 3rd in Experimental Design. The full results can be found here.

the journey

As for the journey, it was quite a long drive all the way down to Nebraska from Wisconsin, at least 8 hours. Thankfully, we were able to fund a nice coach bus for our travels. If it was a school bus, then we would have been cooked. Me and my friend were able to steal the exit row seats, so we got 2 feet of luxurious legroom.

omaha zoo

On the way there, we were able to stop at the Omaha zoo. I thought, "Gee, a zoo in the middle of Nebraska? Total snoozefest!" However, it ended up being quite the experience. They had an aquarium, a nocturnal animals section, and even the "Largest Geodesic Dome in The World!" I'm still not quite sure what that means, but it was a huge glass dome with a desert ecosystem inside it which was sick. There were free flying birds, and a whole bunch of snakes. I still have dreams of waking up to a snake in my bed. There was also a beautiful butterfly room, with a whole bunch of chromatic and iridescent butterflies. There was a really pretty blue butterfly, but it flew away before I could snag a picture. The other ones were more cooperative though.

Orange butterfly on a leaf

some shrimp in a tank - about 3 of these goobers could fit on your fingernail

rooming

Once we had , we roomed in the college dorms. But, in my room, there were 3 lights. The ceiling, and two flanking the mirrors to the door. But one wouldn´t turn off! We ended up having to cover it with a thick blanket in order to obtain any sort of a good night's sleep. The room itself was quite cozy, about the size of a Boston apartment XD. I had brought my florida flag that I had obtained at the '23 national tournament to trade away because I don´t exactly enjoy the political climate of Florida nor want to endorse it. So, I hung it up in the room and placed a certain IKEA shark to spite the spirit of Florida.

if ron desantis saw this, he would tweak out

stem expo and swap meet

There was a STEM expo with industry reps and a swap meet amongst the students before competition day. The STEM expo was very cool, I saw a robot dog, a firefighting drone, some google employees who work at a datacenter, some uni reps, and a whole bunch of others. Some lady tried to recruit me to a job making beer-battered onion rings. I politely declined, for as great as beer-battered onion rings may be, that's not exactly what I envision my future to be. I snagged a few of what I thought were flash drives from the Google execs. But to my dismay, they were just Google-branded thumb drive holders.

sadly not 98 GB of free storage

The swap meet however, was chaotic. Hundred of competitors jostling around, trying to trade their various state-themed wares for that of other state's. Luckily, I had a valuable commodity. The foam cheese head. For some obscure reason, this hat was the most coveted item of them all in the swap meet, so I exerted considerable leverage over the other competitors as the supply was low, and the demand was high. The amount of offers I got was crazy. Some guy offered me his phone for the cheesehead, and others varying amounts of cash, from $2-$35. Our coach instructed us not to take cash for it. Reportedly in '21 some guy got $100 in iTunes giftcards for his cheese head, but that's just a rumor. I pulled up in a pretty crazy fit, and got a lot of comments about it. You can see why.

the best fit of ´25. I could probably win a fashion show with this one /j

a funny shirt i was able to trade for

competition

As for the competition itself, it was very difficult. Per competition guidelines, I'm not exactly allowed to disclose what was on the tests, but what I can say is that it was hard. But it's nationals. What did I expect?

I sadly ended up placing 16th in Codebusters and 18th in Microbe Mission. The microbe placement was better that I expected, but code was way worse. We fumbled the timed question, which would have placed us up around the 10th place. But alas, it was a good season with loads of memories. I've improved so much from the start of the year, and it would have been unthinkable to my past self to see me here.

awards

Our team went into the awards ceremony cautiously optimistic, and hoping for 10th place. We weren't sure that we would get that high, but we had placed in the top 10 at MIT in January, so we knew that we had it in us. The stadium was absolutely packed.

Did you know that when this stadium is full, it becomes the 3rd most populous place in Nebraska?

Before the actual awards ceremony started, there was a massive yap sesh by some people. There was a guy who was from Nebraska, who was on the US Olympic bobsledding team. His career arc was crazy, electrical engineer -> US Olympic bobsled team -> biology assistant professor at UNL. I'm still not exactly sure why that happened, but it was impressive, and quite a good speech.

As awards progressed, we placed a handful of times, but began to lose hope as we saw schools like Harriton, Solon, and Mason dominate the top six. We knew we placed more than Marquette, but had bombed Tower.

Finally, when team placements rolled around, we bit our fingernails in anticipation. I'm pretty sure our coach actually bit his fingernails. Kevin Bao is one heck of a guy. He also sang during the national anthem, and was like...the only one to do so :sob:.

We saw 10th place. Montgomery high school. Our hopes sank.

We saw 9th place. Marquette high school, our rivals. We all internally groaned.

We saw 8th place. Monta Vista high school. We all knew we didn't have a chance.

Then, the announcer said, "And another from Wisconsin, Madison West in Seventh Place!" We all immediately jumped up and screamed because we did NOT expect to place that high, let alone beat Marquette. Kevin and Chloe went down, and accepted the 7th place trophy. Kevin fanned himself onstage (typical) and got applause from the crowd. After that, we were all (hopefully) able to go home happy. Everyone got a chance to take a picture with the trophy, which was a small eagle.

The bus ride home was fun, we stopped at Culvers (as usual) and procrastinated doing our missing schoolwork (as usual). It was an amazing cap to our ´24-´25 Science Olympiad season.

That's it for today,

- Jay