Congratulations to Valencia High School (VHS) teachers Brent Shenton and Brady Bilhartz for leading the school’s Chemistry Olympiad team to first place out of a total of 39 Orange County schools! For the Tigers, this marks the fourth, first place finish in the past eight years.
Team members include:
- Aayush Somani
- Jiwon Jeong
- Chanson Zhao
- Ishaan Shah
- Paige Harakuni
The top 8 Orange County schools:
- #1 – Valencia
- #2 – Troy
- #3 – Beckman
- #4 – University
- #5 – Corona Del Mar
- #6 – Sage Hill
- #7 – Trabuco Hills
- #8 – Los Alamitos
The national round of the competition will be April 21 where the top eleven individual students from Orange County will compete against approximately 1,000 students nationwide on the five hour exam which will include multiple lab experiments. National rules dictate that no more than two competitors per school are allowed to advance to this round. Valencia students Aayush Somani and Jiwon Jeong both made it to this level. Last year, two Valencia students (Ben Nguyen & Aayush Somani) advanced to this round and their combined results placed them better than all but fourteen schools nationwide.
The top twenty individual students from across the nation on the April 21 test will attend two weeks of intensive training and testing at the Air Force Academy in early June. The top four there will represent the U.S. at the international competition to be held in the Czech & Slovakian Republics against approximately 80 competing countries this July.
Jiwon and Aayush proceed to the national test to be held at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa on April 21.
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