Three girls stand dumbfounded at the results of 2017’s Women of Science competition. Their work had again paid off, and for the third year in a row, the high school’s team placed first. Despite returning as the defending champions, the win was not as easy as many would expect.

​

On December 9, Wellesley High School students Kathy Byun ’18, Clover Zheng ’18, and Christina Yang ’18 competed in the Women of Science competition at Bedford High School. The University of Massachusetts and the Bedford Education Association presented the science-focused competition, open to all junior and senior girls in Massachusetts.

​

The competition featured four engineering and science events. The first event, Anything Goes, required students to move among ten different stations, where they answered questions, conducted experiments, and wrote labs. This event included many different types of science, ranging from astronomy to anatomy.

​

The next was a trivia-centered event, where the teams answered trivia questions about female scientists throughout history. Each team that answered a question correctly received a number of points ranging from two to eight, as the questions varied in their point value depending on their difficulty.

​

The third event, the Mystery Challenge, required the teams to construct a working machine on the spot. Going into the contest they were only given the name of the challenge-- Over the Hedge-- but no description of the task itself or the materials needed to complete it.

​

Last, the Boat Bash event required teams to test a pre-built mousetrap-powered boat. Judges scored each boat on its speed in completing the event, and also how straight it could travel.

​

Nearly forty high schools vyed for first place and the corresponding prize, a $1000 scholarship. The contest adopted a scoring system where the teams’ standing in each of the four contests stood as their score for that round. At the end of the competition, the sum of their standings from each round determined their final score. In other words, the lowest score would win.

​

This proved to be no problem for Byun, Zheng, and Yang. The three girls had a total score of eight, winning by a landslide over the other teams. Second place Bedford High School had a score of twenty three.

​

Their standing came as a surprise to the team. “After finishing all the events I thought that we would be in the top 10, but not first,” said Zheng.

​

Byun felt the same way. “I was not expecting first. I actually was thinking we would place third because overall we did well but on the last event, the mystery engineering, we didn’t know how we did. You never know what will come,” she said.

​

Out of the three events, the girls felt most confident in the engineering event, which they could prepare for before the contest. The event required them to build a boat powered by a mousetrap. The coordinators released the objective and tools for this competition prior to its commencement, yet it still posed many challenges.

​

“We built the boat in advance and tested it, but we were worried that it wouldn't go fast enough or straight enough. We almost broke the paddle for the boat the night before,” said Yang.

​

Alongside similar unexpected challenges, the girls had to memorize an immense amount of information. One of the competition’s four events was called “Women of Science,” boasting the same title as the competition itself. The event required all participants to answer trivia style questions on female scientists from all fields of science.

​

“We memorized information on approximately 90 female scientists for this event,” Zheng said.

​

“Our work paid off; basically we knew most of the questions for the women,” said Yang.

​

This, however, was not always the case for the three girls. This was their second year competing in the competition, but last year they had not performed nearly as well.

​

“Last year we were confident and we didn’t prepare a lot -- we thought we knew it all. We didn’t do very well, though,” Zheng said.

​

Their performance last year gave them a new attitude going into this year’s competition.

​

“This year we prepared a lot since we knew there was so much we had to prepare for. We were more nervous going into this year because we know that there are so many names and materials we needed to know,” said Zheng.

​

However, the Anything Goes portion proved to be most challenging for the girls.

​

“Anything Goes was so hard because you couldn’t cover all the things they were talking about. We were very nervous for it,” Yang said.

​

“You never know what will come in that event: we had a logic question which wasn’t even science. It was more statistics-related,” said Byun.

​

While all three girls are on the Science Team at the high school, which Mr. Brian Finn advises, they prepared for this competition independently. However, Finn did provide them with the information about the contest and acted as their coach during it.

​

Zheng, Byun, and Yang all see themselves going into science careers when they are older, as competing in competitions and participating in science-related extracurricular activities have cultivated their love for the subject.