Fossil Ridge High School - Colorado Regional High School Science Bowl
Coach Jesse Oswald has been a science and technology education teacher at Fossil Ridge High School since 2006. A self described extremely mediocre Science Bowl coach, he spends much of his day forgetting that practice is happening and neglecting to turn in paperwork on time. After years of limited success, he finally encountered a team that was able to overcome his amateurism. In his spare time he likes to frustrate himself trying to get a small white ball into a hole in the ground by hitting it with a variety of metal sticks. It rarely goes well but it at least gets him out of the house and is the perfect activity for a typical middle aged man. He also likes to try to fix things both in and around the house and does a pretty good job, as long as you don't look too closely at his work.
Sophie Wang, a sophomore, has achieved the historic landmark of high school nationals. After missing the chance to compete in 2020, she fell into a dingy, quarantine hole. During this time, her itinerary ranged from disastrous baking endeavors and rugged mountain crusades, to decorating drab envelopes and late-night attempts to be an 80s guitarist. In December, though, she garnered the little motivation she had left to fruitlessly memorize Wikipedia (especially physiology articles). Nonetheless, Sophie has not left a 50-mile radius of her house in the past year. Due to this, she began to develop a passion for biology and astronomy. She is also an aquatic animal enthusiast and aspires to be as dandy as the fish-within-a-fish Xiphactinus fossil. P.S. Sophie wonders where she can get NSB soft-serve™ out of season. She suffers from severe “Clover Cafe’ food withdrawal” syndrome and desperately longs for her return to the National 4-H Conference Center.
Jackson Dryg, better known as “AI216” (a nickname he regrets promoting) is a freshman at FRHS. His main subject is math, something the rest of his team also does well, so he likes finding random college textbook (well, Wikipedia) articles online to unite chemistry and physics. He futilely hopes that the topics involved like dark matter or spectroscopy could apply to biology; this is probably why he can’t choose a college major. Outside of Science Bowl, Jackson plays piano, tries mostly in vain to get geometry problems on the AIME, forgets how to play the violin, procrastinates, reads… essentially whatever interests him at the moment, a strategy that usually works but backfired immensely during COVID. To end on a morbid note, he’s worried about technology’s progress; he often procrastinates by finding strange articles about how ASI could ruin our lives or why phthalates could ruin our fertility. Coincidentally, his friends get annoyed that his phone is left for dead.
Ethan Lin is a junior at Fossil Ridge High School. COVID has sucked almost all of his motivation to do anything yet with the little left in him he studied some optics. Sadly, there were no optics questions in the regional sets. At least he now understands why his eyes are so bad and why these thick pieces of glass help the world go from 16p to 8K. Besides holding some *useless* knowledge, Ethan enjoys playing soccer and baking. Ethan’s baking habits have caused his family to stop eating bananas, letting them rot, and forcing him to bake self-acclaimed banana bread every weekend. You may also catch Ethan saying phrases such as “stop patronizing me”, “smh my head” and “didn’t even notice”, and others. Hopefully Ethan will eventually find his motivation somewhere and get a better sense of humor soon.
Ryan Zhang is a senior at FRHS. Due to losing to Sophie’s team in middle school he never made it to nationals until now. Nonetheless, here he is now, competing with the people that he used to compete against. As he plans on majoring in the computer science field, the removal of the computer science category was rather disappointing. That’s alright though; it didn’t stop him from making websites and apps and games galore- sometimes (often) at the expense of studying for Science Bowl. Outside of that, Ryan enjoys both going down Internet rabbit holes (YouTube and Reddit mostly) and occasionally contributing to some of them (have you seen the top post all-time on r/ProgrammerHumor?). Oh, and video games! Ryan enjoys copious amounts of them, especially this year! What else are you going to do during the pandemic, stuck at home all day?
Aarav Shah is a sophomore at Fossil Ridge High School. He spends most of his time doing… well, basically nothing. Yes, Aarav has way too much time on his hands. Somehow this (ironically) leads to things like watching YouTube videos at 3 a.m. (don’t ask), reading random quantum physics articles at 5 a.m. (still don’t ask), or procrastinating his Science Bowl bio (sorry Sophie). And let’s not mention losing $10,000 dollars in a Blackjack game (trust me, you don’t want to know). By the way, that last sentence was a joke (sort of). But other than all the procrastinating, he does very much enjoy soccer and computer science, neither of which he is very good at (maybe because he doesn’t have enough time…). Alas, it was after the writing of this entire bio that Aarav discovered his overuse of parentheses but, oh well, it’s too late to change it now (or is it)?
