Portola High School’s Science Olympiad team placed third at the Orange County Regionals, hosted at the University of California, Irvine on Feb. 14. This overall team placement is Science Olympiad’s highest for a regional competition since 2023. 

The competition involved 23 total events and included inquiry-based assessments, along with engineering builds. Co-captain and senior Kayley Winata and junior Zephyr Low placed first in Chem Lab, and senior Suhrith Muvvala and freshman Arya Aia placed third in Anatomy and Physiology, the highest that the team has ever placed in those categories.

“[The team] put in a lot of work with all the invitationals that we’ve gone to,” Science Olympiad adviser Christian Quinteros said. “Our builds this year at regionals were really good. We actually walked away with first place in [four] different fold events, which is crazy, because we’ve never done that before, but it just goes to show how much time they put into preparing and studying and building.” 

To prepare, all team members participated in testing every week using resources from past Science Olympiad competitions and invitations, along with additional work through extra assessments for builds and inquiries, according to engineering lead and senior Andrew Zhang. He noted that the team put in a lot more effort in this process. 

“For builds, we typically only test on the Saturday meetings at school, but for the two weeks leading up [to] regionals, we also tested during office hours [and] after school,” Zhang said.

Science Olympiad member and sophomore Dean Perez competed in the Hovercraft, Robot Tour and Machines events and placed first, first and seventh, respectively. Perez said that he prepared for the competition through an extensive process of research, testing, data collection and making revisions to his hardware and code. 

“I want to make sure I can get a good placement at states because it’s a way higher level than regionals is, and I want our team to do really good at that,” Perez said. “Definitely at least top 10, because last year, we got 12th or 13th place.”

Since the team placed in the top five teams, all members are qualified to advance to the Southern California Science Olympiad State Tournament, which will take place at the California Institute of Technology on April 11. Going forward, the team aims to build encouragement and healthy competition within the team, seeking improvement through practice, such as weekly testing for builds, according to Zhang.