Students place second in astronomy competition in San Jose
Posted on 08. Jun, 2010 by editor3 in News
By Makenzie Damm
Assistant Editor
A nice chunk of cash, $500 per person to be exact and an asteroid named in their honor. For senior Laree Gardner and junior Stephen Morrison, as well as South High School senior Genevieve Wang, these are the perks that come with receiving second place at the International Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, California in the astronomy team’s category.
“Money is always nice. Anytime you get money you’re happy about it, but just to know there is going to be an asteroid named after me is awesome because it will always be there even when I die,” Gardner said.
Despite living the fantasy of having your name written in the sky and becoming $500 richer, the process wasn’t easy. From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. the team stood by their project, in which they described their technique in finding the one real planetary nebula (dead star) out of the seven they observed on a telescope at the Kipp Peak National Observatory. Throughout their findings the team faced some difficulties, but that did not slow them down in the least.
“There were some very ugly times and some very rewarding times while working on it. That is the joy of it because we can pull everything we learn from our different backgrounds into this project,” Gardner said.
Aside from their differences the team came together to produce something not many can achieve. Along this journey they also experienced life changing lessons where they met people from as far as Brazil and Saudi Arabia.
“This experience was really cool. We’ve been working on it all year, every week for about three hours each time we met. To see how much it paid off was exciting,” Wang said.
Not only did they have each other, but they sought guidance from another scientific figure that let them in on what to expect throughout the week. This was earth science teacher Ardis Herrold, who has worked with 10 different teams in the past.
“It’s very exciting for me as a teacher to experience. I’ve never had a second place winning team, until now,” Herrold said.
This second-place-winning team plans to carry this experience for the rest of their lives, or even for eternity due to the small rocky object honoring their name. The biggest aspect that made it happen was teamwork, which in their case is inevitable.
“If you take one thing that everyone can work hard at and you put us all together it’s an amazing aura,” Gardner said.
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