How presitigious is winning a medal in the National Science Olympiad competition?
I dunno. I’ve been hanging around engineering schools as both student and teacher for years and years, and I’d never heard of the Science Olympiad until the newspaper I write for made me do an article about the program at the local high school. An athletic-team approach strikes me as an odd way to teach science, though it seems to make school administrators happy enough. For all I know, participation in the S.O. might really impress some admissions committee people, but I’d never heard it mentioned by any of my students over the years, nor by any of my fellow professors.
