Fourteen members of the JETS team competed in the Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering (WYSE) sectionals on March 15 to secure a second place win. The competition was held at North Central College in Naperville.

“We did tryouts in October, and we had a list of 32 students, and they took some practice tests along the line,” said Mr. Breig, club sponsor. “Then Ms. Breig [co-sponsor] and I picked the roster… then [we] competed at regionals. Once we qualified as a team… we made a few switches [to the roster], and then we competed at sectionals.”

The 14 members who competed were freshman Srinivas Kaza, juniors Ana Carell, Rajiv Deshpande, Zixi Liang, and Jenny Lohmeier, and seniors Gouri Dharmavaram, Linda Jiang, Lucas Mayer, Chris Merchantz, Joseph Shayani, Claire Walker, Stephanie Wey, Shirley Yang, and Andy Zhou.

Each member participated in two of six different subjects, which included biology, chemistry, computer science, math, English, and physics. The team received 459 points out of a possible 500 points by the end of the competition.

Five students won medals for their performance:

Chris Merchantz, 1st place in chemistry

Lucas Mayer, 2nd place in computer science

Stephanie Wey, 2nd place in biology

Andy Zhou, 3rd place in computer science

Claire Walker, 3rd place in English

The success at sectionals allows the team to move forward into the state competition, which will be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on April 5.