Students win science awards demonstrate the academic success of Saratoga

The school is widely recognized for its STEM accomplishments, and recently a handful of its students have excelled in various competitions.

Junior Alex Li,  co-president of the Science Club as well as a co-captain for the Science Bowl team, recently qualified as a semifinalist in the Physics Olympiad.

Much like its more prominent math counterpart, the Math Olympiad, the Physics Olympiad consists of a series of tests. The open exam is the first step.

Li finished among the top 500 scorers in the nation and will move onto the semifinal exam. Others who are moving on to the semifinal exam include senior Landon Chow and juniors Brendan Ney, Sean Shi, Kristine Zhang and Celine Liang. Liang also recently won a gold medal in the 2015 EGMO math competition in Minsk, Belarus.

Despite the accolades and the “college points” that come with participating in and winning educational competitions, Li advised that their importance lies beyond just the recognition.

"Don’t engage in competitions just for the sake of winning or winning awards,” Li said. “If you do that you are definitely going to lose interest and it is not going to be fulfilling; you need to do this based on what you like.”

He points out that the experience gained from studying is more valuable than “the recognition that you gain from these competitions.”

Senior Agastya Gupta has been recognized as a SIEMENS Finalist and an Intel STS semifinalist this year. He said research in and of itself is what drives him.

“There is nothing quite as rewarding as research. It doesn't matter if what you do succeeds or fails miserably; you have advanced the scientific world and you have made your own small contribution to this vast pool of human knowledge,” Gupta said.

Gupta credits his accomplishments in science to his initial curiosity as a child. “I have always been exploring ‘what ifs?’ in my head since childhood,” Gupta said. “Some of them, such as ‘what if I develop a computer vision algorithm to enable a smartphone camera to drastically ameliorate the diagnosis of the jugular venous pulse?’ have led to successful projects.”

In most cases students who have been successful in competitions such as this, are  individuals like Li who have been interested in learning since a young age.
Students like Zhang have been on this “educational road” to their academic success long before high school.

According to her, she has enjoyed math for a long time, which influenced her into taking a liking to science.

In addition to being a Physics Olympiad semifinalist, Zhang has won various other awards such as being a SIEMENS competition regional finalist and a Google Science Fair global regional finalist.