Science Bowl begins tryouts

Science Bowl is a national competition that tests knowledge concerning many STEM fields, and the TJ Science Bowl team were last year’s Virginia Regionals winners, and selected to represent the state nationally.

Photo courtesy of Science Bowl

Science Bowl is a national competition that tests knowledge concerning many STEM fields, and the TJ Science Bowl team were last year’s Virginia Regionals winners, and selected to represent the state nationally.

Eric Feng, Online Editor in Chief

Last week, Jefferson’s Science Bowl team announced that tryouts began on Wednesday, Nov. 2. Science Bowl is a competition that involves a variety of trivia concerning mathematics and science.

Science Bowl has a rather atypical organization system, abandoning the traditional club structures that we usually see in other “Bowl” competitions, such as Quiz Bowl or History Bowl.

Science Bowl is a difficult club to organize. Organizing clubs in general is difficult in general due to the various responsibilities, but Science Bowl is uniquely difficult due to the fact that usually there’s only one or two people that remain each year, partially because there’s only one Science Bowl competition, and they only accept one five-person team per school,” senior Om Duggineni, club representative, said.

The club has undergone several changes in this past year, but the biggest change is in its competition format.

“One thing that changed is that they switched to an in-person format this year, since they’ve been online since COVID hit. I remember participating in the in-person competition, and it’s really fun. The online competition honestly doesn’t really hold a candle to it,” Duggineni said.

However, the change in competition format hasn’t spelled a change for interest.

“I don’t think there’s been less interest. Science Bowl tended to have about 30 to 40 people show up for tryouts every year,” Duggineni said.

Despite Science Bowl only accepting one team, the club management wants to try other methods to keep Science Bowl in the spotlight.

“One major difficulty with Science Bowl is that it’s hard to maintain interest in the club after the team is selected because we’re only allowed to send a five-person team and there’s only one main Science Bowl competition, unlike Quizbowl. My hope is we can create a [Jefferson] in-house science competition at some point to maintain interest,” Duggineni said.