Courtesy of Saratoga High School
Junior Arjun Krish is one of 20 students in the country who have a shot at representing the US at the International Biology Olympiad.By the time he was a freshman, Arjun Krish had tired of the competitive math contests he had begun in middle school.
In search of something to fill the void, Krish, now a junior, joined the school’s Science Bowl team and began to specialize in biology. Two years later, he has qualified as one of the 20 best biology students in the country and will be participating in the International Biology Olympiad (IBO) training camp at Harvard University this summer, held from June 22 to July 4.
About the reasoning for his decisions, Krish said, “I’m doing biology for [Science Bowl], might as well get into the Olympiad. And if I get into that, I’ll get better at both the same.”
The IBO is an annual biology competition among teams from across the globe. It pits a nation’s top four biology students against the elite from other nations.
This year’s competition will take place in the Philippines. American students who wish to qualify take two tests: the USA Biolympiad (USABO) open exam, a multiple-choice test open to all high schoolers, and the USABO semifinal exam, a mixed multiple-choice and free-response test open to those who scored above a cutoff score on the open exam.
At the IBO training camp, the 20 qualifiers will be narrowed down to a team of four over the course of a 12-day camp consisting of lectures and exams. Krish also received high enough scores on the semifinal exam to qualify for the IBO camp in 2023 and 2024, but his scores were invalidated for different reasons. In 2023, he mistakenly wrote his name on the short-answer portion of the test, leading to his disqualification as the organizers believe seeing a name may result in inadvertent bias by graders. In 2024, errors in administering the exam led to his disqualification as well.
Since his freshman year, Krish estimates he has dedicated up to 5,000 hours to studying biology. His studying mostly consisted of reading textbooks like “Biology” by Neil Campbell, which Krish refers to as “biology Bible” because it encompasses nearly all the material tested on the USABO exams and at the IBO. After becoming well versed in basic biology knowledge, he moved on to reading more specialized textbooks that focus on topics like genetics, cell biology, plant biology and anatomy.
As of late, Krish has shifted his focus toward analyzing research papers — both for fun and to help him with his own lab work — and completing biology problem sets — such as ones from MIT’s biology classes.
IBO campers like Krish also receive three problem sets per week from the camp organizers to hone knowledge leading up to the camp. The lab section of the IBO gives students lab materials and requires them to experimentally determine the identity of different organic substances. For example, in 2014, students used restriction enzyme analysis to identify three plasmids.
“Historically the US is bad at [the lab section of the IBO],” Krish said. “We always place first or second in theory [against] China so the point of the camp is to get people good at practicals.”
Throughout his few years delving into biology, Krish has participated in smaller, community-run biology competitions — like the American Regional Biology Competition (ARBC) and the International Biology Bowl (IBB) — and has since joined ARBC’s and IBB’s problem-writing teams. He has also participated in online Science Bowl invitationals that are either standard or biology-focused — like a recent one hosted by Amador Valley High and a high school in Maryland.
“I’ve been studying biology and reading tons of books and doing tons of problems for two and a half years,” Krish said. “[Qualifying for camp] validated my work for those years.”
