Hi, long time lurker, first time poster!
My daughter is in the 9th grade at a moderately competitive magnet school. Students can only be on one of these three teams, robotics, forensics and Science Olympiad. She has done both forensics and Science Olympiad in middle school, an gotten awards in both, but is now faced with the dilemma of choosing. Both teams are pretty successful, forensics has members who routinely place, and Science Olympiad was 3rd at state last year, hoping for a 2nd place finish this year which gives them a spot at Nationals.
She describes herself as having two parts to her extracurriculars, her interest in science and math (as shown through math competitions, science fairs), and her interest in humanities (Scholastic Writing Awards, forensics, Nat’l history day, blog). We are unsure whether to go with Science Olympiad or to go with Forensics and supplement with other science EC’s like HOSA, USA Biology Olympiad or Science Fair. If anyone’s been in a somewhat similar situation and has some insight, please advise.
Honestly I would ask her which one she likes better.
But…just to give you more of a weighing mechanism, when you say that the forensics students regularly place, what does that mean? Are they earning bids to Nationals, Catholic Nationals, and the Tournament of Champions, or is it more of them placing at local tournaments and qualifying to state? (If you don’t know the answer, there is a very easy way to see the competitiveness of your school’s program, inbox me).
I’ve done SciOly and Forensics, but I compete with a generally uncompetitive school who’s success is generally on the state level. I will say that the network of “forensicators” is much stronger nationally, and forensics generally offers more opportunities to compete (I did 12 forensics competitions my first year, science Olympiad only has regionals, states, nats, and the occasional invitational)
My daughter was involved in a diverse set of EC’s in middle school, similar to your daughter though her school didn’t offer as many opportunities. And she had quite a bit of success, getting to state and national levels of competition.
How did she decide? Certainly not by trying to assess her likelihood of winning prizes to impress colleges. She ended up dropping nearly all of the EC’s. Although she loved them at the time, she picked things which she wanted to try and do regardless of whether she is going to win prizes (for instance she is now a JV athlete in a sport she’s unlikely even to make Varsity in, much less win any prizes). She loves it. She’s also pursuing her interest in writing, forging her own path and putting a lot of time into some things that aren’t on any defined competition path to win prizes, but which she enjoys and is getting good life experience from.
I would urge you to get away from trying to figure out which EC is going to give her the trophy that colleges will value the most and focus on figuring out what she is most interested in.
My kids did the ECs that they thought were fun and interested them and to some extent the ones their friends were also doing. Their Sci Oly team started making it to states the year my oldest joined, but since they never made it to Nationals the had extra time in the latter part of the yar when APs kicked in. It sounds like she could more easily pursue her literary/verbal interests on the side.
@TheAtlantic I do know that the school team got 4th at state last year.
@mathyone We aren’t concerned with potential college admissions especially in 9th. She just wanted to pursue both interests in high school somehow and wanted to find the best possible option.
@mathmom Thanks for your response! I agree with what you are saying, she just liked the public speaking component of Forensics since she doesn’t do theater or anything similar and there seem to be other opportunities for science (though none to the extent of science Olympiad)
OK, well then rather than detailing her chances to win state or national awards, tell us what she likes about them, and how additional years of them will further benefit her development, how they relate to her potential college major or career goals. Since she has already done both, you should have a pretty clear idea about all this.
They are all great pursuits, she can’t go wrong with any of them. But I do think that forensics is a lifelong skill that will help you for the rest of your life ie; high school, college, work, social interactions, mentoring others, coaching etc. Think about all the smart adults you know that are either terrible public speakers or are afraid of public speaking. I bet none of them participated in forensics.
Just make sure whatever she picks, she enjoys, otherwise anyone of them can turn to drudgery.
@mathyone She really enjoys the community aspect of both clubs and how Science Olympiad (in this school) focuses on mastery of areas of science (Bio, Chem, Physics) then later it focuses on the specific events. However she really likes developing public speaking and writing skills through forensics.
My kids did not have either of these available, but if they had the opportunity to do one of them, I also would have encouraged forensics for the development of life-long skills, as mentioned above.
Don’t forget the social aspect of the teams. Has she gone to meetings yet? Quite simply which set of kids did she like best? Does she have friends joining either?
I agree about putting aside the chances of winning or placing in considering which to join. D said the kids enjoyed the robotics team more when they were “mediocre” placing in the middle but did lots of community service than when they became successful, the new coach becoming obsessed with moving to the next level and getting specific awards.
My kids’ school didn’t put limits on choosing between them. My kids were able to do speech AND robotics AND activities like quiz bowl. Too bad they are making your kid choose.
It is a shame that the school has such limits. Both activities are equally fine for college. If there is one she prefers, go with that. If they are exactly equal she can look at other things like what her friends are doing, which one participants seem to enjoy more, if one adviser is more supportive etc. Also consider another outlets available for her “other side” – ex. if she goes with forensics is there a different science-related activity she can join and enjoy or if she does science olympiad are there other humanities based activities she can join at school?.
" My kids were able to do speech AND robotics AND activities like quiz bowl. " Wow. At our school there are no rules, but it’s not possible to do more than one significant EC or sport–they meet on most or all days so how would you possibly schedule all of that?
My kids went to an independent private school that was committed to letting the kids participate in a lot of things. And to be realistic, they had to be somewhat flexible to allow kids to deal with conflicts to maintain teams (less than 100 kids per graduating class). Quiz Bowl goes on all year — if my kid wasn’t very available during robotics build season, which is super intense from January to mid-February, they dealt with it in QB, but she did her best to attend the competitions. Speech was more independent anyway – the kids met with advisors, worked on their speeches on their own time, practices with their advisors and friends when they had time. Every coach/activity teacher was pretty good about allowing kids leeway if they had a competition in another area. And our team has won a lot of awards at state in speech, and they have been to nationals in Quiz Bowl and Robotics for several years running. So it has worked well for them. Team sports are more challenging, but even those kids were often in a few other activities.
I think schools with a lot of kids can afford to be more selective, and cut kids out who aren’t all in on an activity. But it is one reason I was happy with my kids’ school – they got to do a lot of different activities.
Our ECs don’t meet that often and there is no limit on what you can participate in, other than any tryouts and the fundamental limit of being in one location at one time. This is a public HS with about 2000 students.
Even Mock Trial, which is nationally ranked at our HS, “only” meets twice a week for several hours each. For us, debate (which my son does), is not that competitive or time consuming because most of the kids who would be competitive do Mock Trial or drama. His Debate club mainly does Public Forum debates, which don’t require a lot of research in advance. He likes it more because he enjoys discussing current events and ethical topics than for the competition.
Robotics, if you are talking about FRC, takes a lot of hours in the January-April months, and doing anything else then (even classes sometimes) is a problem.
Science Olympiad and Science Bowl are part of the Science Club at our school. His school isn’t all that competitive about Olympiad; they do it for fun. For Science Bowl, they did get 2nd at regionals last year, so almost went to nationals and have been to nationals a few years ago. But, they only had about 10 weekend practices and assigned some textbook reading. Some of the teams they beat have for-credit classes in which they train for Science Bowl, Science Olympiad, etc.
My son is doing Debate Club, SciOly, and FTC robotics this year – plus Math Club (various competitions), Science Bowl, a nationally-ranked computer hacking team, and some other things. He’s thinking about FRC robotics, but I’m discouraging that. There are conflicts; he won’t be able to attend a Debate tournament next month because he’ll be at a hacking competition in another state.
(Oddly, “forensics” is used for both speech and computer security, so I had to figure out which one you meant.)
Science Olympiad meets once a week at our school though right before tournaments they get in a panic and may do it every day. I don’t know about Forensics - if we had it neither kid did it. But generally it was easy for kids to do at least two ECs. Oldest did Sci Olympiad and Academic Team. Youngest did orchestra (one met zero period, the other during the day), Literary Magazine and Sci Olympiad. Oh and he was in some math tutoring honors society senior year as well.
Robotics at our school started about two months ago. You wouldn’t be able to get onto a team at this point, which shuts out the kids who do a fall sport or EC like Academic team.