Grace Ai | The Chronicle
Competitions, whether academic or athletic, can be incredibly stressful. However, some students at Mason High School (MHS) have found that the friends they made while competing are just as rewarding as coming back with a trophy.
From D.C. to Disney World, MHS students have the opportunity to join many extracurricular activities that travel outside the city limits to compete at the highest level in their areas of interest.
MHS junior Alice Luo is a member of Mason’s Science Olympiad, an academic club that hosts events covering various areas of science. Luo currently competes in Disease Detectives, Dynamic Planet, Rocks and Minerals, and Chemistry. For some Science Olympiad invitationals, students must travel by bus or plane and stay overnight at a hotel. Luo says that being a part of the club and traveling with them provides a space dedicated to community beyond school or home life.
“Staying overnight for competitions is definitely different from traveling with your family on a vacation,” Luo said. “You have to exert a lot of independence. It’s also a taste of what life after high school looks like, because you’re in charge of choosing where to eat, what to do on the nights before competitions, and when to sleep.”
On Jan. 23, the Science Olympiad flew to Boston for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) invitational. The team was supposed to return home on Jan. 25, but Boston was hit with a snowstorm that changed the team’s flight plans. After having a delay, cancellation, and over 24 hours in the airport, they ultimately flew back to Columbus and drove back to the Cincinnati area. Luo said it was a bonding moment for the whole team and taught them how to deal with adversity.
MHS Science Olympiad team members play cards while handling flight cancellations at an airport in Boston following the MIT invitational
“We just hung out in the terminal,” Luo said. “We just played cards and ate a lot of food. [Playing games together] I got to talk with people [on the team] whom I might not have talked to before. We got to teach the new freshmen how to play, and it was pretty exciting for them.”
MHS sophomore Suhani Satapathy is a member of Speech and Debate and Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA). Currently, Satapathy works with sophomore Vibha Gudla in the event Public Forum for Speech and Debate. They met at a national competition in California for FBLA and shared a room together with a few other people, getting to know each other in that environment and becoming good friends afterwards. In Public Forum, students work in pairs to debate against another pair on a specific topic while a judge determines which team made a stronger argument.
Satapathy said they chose to do this event because it was one they thought they had potential in, but also gave them a good chance at getting on the rosters in order to participate in competitions, compared to some of the larger and more competitive events in the club, where it would be more challenging. However, they had a hard time getting to compete at first because their schedules constantly conflicted with the tournament dates.
“When you have a partner, it’s tough because if one of you can’t go, then both are out of [the tournament],” Satapathy said. “And we also didn’t know what we were doing. Our biggest challenge was just figuring out that first competition and getting the hang of the format, but once we got it, it’s been pretty good from there.”
Satapathy explains that for most overnight competitions, bus rides can last up to five hours just to get to the town where they’re competing. During that time, the students on the bus are either socializing or preparing for their event.
“It’s so much fun,” Satapathy said. “Everyone is mutually scared, no matter what the event is. You can hear the speech people practicing their speeches, and you can hear the debate people prepping their cases, but then it gets to a point where everyone is like ‘whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen.’”
Once they make it to the hotel, Satapathy says people like to get together to play games or talk late into the night, sometimes not sleeping at all. Additionally, her first overnight tournament was also her very first debate competition.
“I was definitely nervous,” Satapathy said. “But all the fun we had the night before eased my nerves because even if I don’t get a great placement out of this tournament, I got a great experience out of it.”
According to Satapathy, she wouldn’t have nearly as many friends as she does now if she weren’t in any of her current clubs. Without them, she wouldn’t have gone to the parties or hangouts she attends, or have be as confident a speaker.
“I don’t think I’d have 80 percent of the friends that I do [if not for team travel],” Satapathy said. “All these clubs have given me some of my best friends. That’s probably the best part about the clubs, and I feel like more people should give debate a try.”
