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Van Nuys High School’s Academic Decathlon team earned 27 medals at the regional California Academic Decathlon held at Roybal High School on Feb. 1, securing a place in the state competition scheduled for March 21-22 in Santa Clara.
The California Academic Decathlon is an annual competition where teams of high school students compete across 10 events, including essays, interviews, speeches and subject exams. Schools field teams composed of students from three GPA categories: Honors, Scholastic and Varsity.
Nine students from Van Nuys High will advance to the state-level competition after the team’s results in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) event.
Their Coach, Mr. Jonathan Mitchell expressed that the team reached their goal. They placed 2nd in Division one behind Bell High School allowing them to continue to the state competition.
Seniors Mariana Poghosyan, Tiffany Marin, Daisy Cruz, Drew Herbst, Suhani Mehta, Reynold Finnegan, Abby Zeng, Shamin Ahmed, Priya Surajbansi and Junior Diego Serrano are all part of the competition team and all put in the dedication and hard work that made it possible for them to move onto state.
“Our goal has always been to make it to state,” Mr. Mitchell said. “That’s the big goal, because it’s good for the school.”
It is very difficult for teams to advance to state due to the amount of competition and talented students on all teams.
“Very few teams made it so it’s an honor to make it,” Mr. Mitchell said. “It’s good for the team because they work really hard for 10 months.”
The competition tested participants across 10 academic categories, including mathematics, science, literature and economics.
Co-captain Reynold Finnegan says that they hoped to be successful and move onto state.
“Our team was really excited,” Finnegan said. “ It kind of came as a surprise and it was really cool because we were all able to go up and get our medals from the superintendent. Then of course, we got our plaque.”
The team’s medal count came from a range of subjects, reflecting strong individual performances.
In order for our school’s Academic Decathlon team to be successful, there were numerous hours of work dedicated to studying the various subjects they are required to know.
“It’s to study as much time as possible and our strategy is to study a little bit every day,” Mr. Mitchell said. “Each day we just plan out what we have to cover. And then we go six days a week and we cover the material in smaller pieces.”
Out of the topics they are required to know, Finnegan says the one he finds the most difficult is economics.“That’s the rough consensus,” he said. “There’s a lot of graphs and they could get very weird when you look at them a lot. They were our lowest score for the summer.”
The competition comes in two parts.
The first part requires them to take tests online with the goal of getting the questions correct to contribute to the overall score.
The competition at Roybal High School consisted of the second part of the competition being the speeches, interview and Superquiz.
In order to keep themselves motivated and engaged, they make sure to encourage each other during the competition.
“We have this llama,” Finnegan said. “It’s a stuffed animal and we bring it everywhere to all our competitions and we pass it around before we go in to give our speech. I guess it helps people get excited. During our breaks we’ll just talk and try to motivate each other.
They will continue to stay motivated and study for the state finals in Santa Clara where top-performing teams from across California will compete for further recognition and potential qualification for the national competition.
