By Pennie Lu | Posted May 11, 2023
Montgomery High School sent a team of four students to the annual Science Bowl where about 50 teams from schools across the state met at the Princeton Plasma Center for a day of intense competition.
From left to right: Gloria Yao, Pennie Lu, Steven Cowley (Director of
PPPL), Viktoria Leopold, and Captain Krish Gupta after the Montgomery
team completed their rounds of competition.
Led by Krish Gutpa, the all-junior team lost their first round against West Windsor Plainsboro North High School with a score of 18 to 216 before making a comeback in the second round against Marine Academy of Science and Technology with a final score of 100 to 50.
In their final elimination round they lost to J.P. Stevens High School with a score of 22 to 226, but the team was happy with their results. “I think we did pretty well considering we didn’t prepare as much as some of the other teams here,” said Gutpa. “Did you know that some teams were preparing for this over the summer? We only found out about it two weeks ago! So we just kind of took it as a learning experience instead. It was a really good opportunity for us to see what kind of result we could achieve through mostly just our school classes.”
All the students had taken AP Chemistry last year and were currently in AP Biology. Gutpa was concurrently taking AP Physics as well, and Viktoria was in BioTech and Anatomy. They all had demonstrated interest in STEM-related subjects and chose to pursue this interest together.
Viktoria mentioned, “I’m really grateful to Mr. Bulusu for giving us the opportunity to go to this event and learn from all the other students who were there. I hope we get to do more in the future.” The rest of the team similarly expressed their gratitude towards their advisor, who also served as their AP Chemistry teacher last year.
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The Montgomery team interacted with many other students that were there as well, building and rekindling friendships. Taking the event as a learning experience allowed them to try and connect with others through hobbies and interests, instead of just focusing on winning the tournament.
By the end, they had made several new friends and gotten closer to each other as well. When asked about their favorite part of the event, they unanimously agreed. “It was definitely meeting the director of the Princeton Plasma Center. He was our adjudicator and had this really cool British accent. Plus, when we googled him, we found out that he had a Wikipedia page! And he was knighted by the Queen of England! That means we were only one degree of separation away from knowing the Queen, which is crazy.”
Congratulations to the team for their win in the Science Bowl, and their unwavering enthusiasm for science!
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