By Ganesh Palaniappan
The University of Michigan Science Olympiad (UMSO) works to organize, plan, and execute two
Science Olympiad competitions – an invitational and regional tournament– that bring together
STEM-focused middle and high school students from around the country to campus every year.
Through our event, we hope to spread our love for STEM and help support the younger
generation as they explore their own interests.
We recently held our invitational competition on February 15th, and it was a success! We had
over 80+ teams and 1600+ students attending. We had schools from as far as California
attending, reflecting our tournament’s prestigious status.
One problem we had arose was losing a room we booked the day before the competition. We
booked the room wrong, which led to the reservation getting revoked. We instead pivoted and
quickly assigned a new room for that particular part of the event. We also had another team
working to fix the map we provide, and a third to print and restaple the map packets.
Building a team and “collect, combine, and create” were BLI habits that were paramount to our
success. With an event on this scale being run wholly by students, distributing our work but still
communicating between us was very important. We held weekly meetings throughout the
semester for our team to talk about what they accomplished that week and what they need to do
in the future. This process allowed us to help each other where we see fit, and to stay informed.
In the future, we hope to apply the pause and reflect habit, before our next competition – the
regional tournament which takes place on March 15th. We hope to debrief and discuss how we
can improve the tournament experience for students and their coaches!
