Chemistry students take on the WUCT

Four students traveled to the Washington University campus on April 11 to compete in the Washington University Chemistry Tournament (WUCT). Juniors Trevor Jenkins, Addison Mueller, and Ali Zhang along with sophomore Ishaan Banker competed individually and as a team from 8:30a.m.-6:00p.m.. The students went through four divisions of exams that included topics taught in AP Chemistry and  beyond the curriculum.

During the first round of exams, the students worked individually through different concepts. After the first division, the group broke off into pairs to compete in topic exams where the duos could choose from a range of topics to test over. During the last two sections of the tournament, the group rejoined and completed an exam together, then faced off against other schools. 

While all of the juniors are currently enrolled in AP Chemistry, Banker is only taking grade-level chemistry. This caused some challenges for Banker due to the tournament being based on higher-level chemistry.

“[There] was definitely a bit of a discrepancy in the team to me, since I was with juniors in AP [Chemistry]. However, I felt I was able to keep up with my own expertise on the exams, especially the team one,” Banker said. “Many of the concepts felt a bit foreign to me, making me take a bit longer to understand questions compared to the others. While I initially felt a bit disadvantaged, I eventually loved the tournament and will absolutely return next year.”

Science teacher Dr. Teddy Gray went to the WUCT along with the students and saw that even though Banker was not in AP Chemistry, he could still help out the team.

“[The tournament] was my first time meeting Ishaan, and I learned right away that he’s a really bright kid. He has not taken AP Chemistry yet, but he actually has learned a lot of chemistry on his own and he’s really advanced in math, so that helped add to our team,” Gray said.

While taking the second round of exams, Banker enjoyed being able to choose which topics to be tested over.

“The topic exams were pretty fun. We were able to select from topics like Lasers, Exercise Science, and TV Shows/Movies. Since we were short [on] people, we only did lasers and exercise with partners, which was pretty fun. The laser exam was a bit hard, but I recognized a lot of the concepts and was able to do a decent part of the math. There was a considerable amount of math and physics in it,” Banker said. 

The first competition that the group competed in together consisted of a thirty-page exam that the group had an hour to complete. Banker ran into challenges during this exam due to the advanced topics on it.

“[While taking the exam together], we split up the sections and each got to work. At the end, we compiled all of our papers together and turned it in. Our system for the exam was that each of us would have a question; there were six questions, so we split it up into sections that each of us were good at, and if we did not know how to do the problem, we would put the page in the middle for others to try and figure out,” Banker said. “This [part] was definitely a challenge, due to me being stuck with a five-page section on quantum mechanics. I was able to brute force a lot of the math to get roughly correct solutions, but it was definitely a challenge I was not expecting. We were able to get through the majority of the exam, but there were definitely multiple problems that were pretty hard for all of us. I had a horrendous question on particle motion that took all of us together to solve.”

The final part of the tournament was hectic for Banker and he liked participating in it with his teammates.

“[The last division] was the ‘Breaking Bonds’ competition, which was the most fun part of the day to me. This competition was a collaborative frenzy to complete as many problems as possible and get as many points as we could,” Banker said. “Since we could only have one paper of problems at a time, we were all huddled around the paper holder. We basically split up the problems on the paper and answered them simultaneously, which did work out for us. This was super fun and chaotic, since we were all hyperfocused on completing one paper to get more questions as quickly as possible.”

At the end of the tournament, Gray was happy with how the students performed and the fact that they chose to spend their Saturday at a chemistry competition.

“I thought it went really well. The students who participated in it enjoyed it [and] said it was a good experience. They really liked being on the campus of WashU,” Gray said. “I was really impressed [with them] because I know there’s a lot more fun things to do on a Saturday than take four chemistry exams, but they were really determined to do it. I was really proud that they put in that much effort to compete,” Gray said.