Hinsdale Central JETS Win State Championship

Submitted by Hinsdale Township High School District 86. Standing: Harrison Wang, Peter Ren, Shirong Liu, Satya Krishnan, Kiril Kolev, Joseph Wittrock, Yu-Lin Yang, Matthew Yeh, Brian Glowniak, Shubhakar Deo, Srinivas Kaza, Michael Chang, Mike Schaub, Jake Heiser, Alex Choi, Jamez Zhou. Seated: Ellen Jiang, Ambika Kumar, Camila Horowicz, Snajana Srinivasan, James Reilly, Rachel Wang, Syed Rizvi, Ankush Bajaj. Floor: Priya Pillai, Anisha Nallakrishnan, Mita Ramani, Hana Rimawi, Chitra Ballakrishnan, Isha Kukadia. Front: Mr. Breig, Ms. Breig. Not Pictured: Nathalie Phillips.

Hinsdale Township High School District 86 congratulated the Hinsdale Central High School Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS) for its first place finish at the Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering (WYSE) State Championship. This win marks the team’s first win at WYSE. The championship was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Red Devil JETS Team is an academic squad who attends two competitions each year: WYSE and TEAMS, or Testing of Engineering Aptitude Math and Science. The WYSE competition involves teams of 14 students each taking two subjects to form a team score. Subjects are biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering graphics, English, mathematics and physics. To complete the season, the JETS team had to go through Regional, Sectional, and State testing. The top two teams advance from regional to sectional, and then two teams advance from sectional to state. A single “wildcard” team from all third-place teams is selected to advance as well.

The Red Devils took third place at regionals and advanced to sectionals as a wildcard. The team then proceeded to win sectionals and then continued on to be the state champions. The Hinsdale Central JETS have advanced to the state finals in each of the past eight seasons and in 13 of the past 14 years. The team finished in second place in 1988 and 1993.

Commenting on next year, Marvin Breig, Hinsdale Central science teacher and JETS coach, noted that the next season has a lot of potential.

“Of the 20 students who represented our school in WYSE, we have 12 students returning, which is almost a full WYSE roster already,” said Coach Breig. “Of our entire 31-member squad, we have 18 possible returnees. While we won’t go so far to predict another WYSE championship, we have a lot of returning talent and should be highly rated again next season.”

The 20 students who represented Hinsdale Central for WYSE this year included: Ankush Bajaj, Michael Chang, Alex Choi, Shubhankar Deo, Brian Glowniak, Jake Heiser, Ellen Jiang, Srinivas Kaza, Shirong Liu, Anisha Nallakrishnan, Nathalie Phillips, Priya Pillai, James Reilly, Peter Ren, Syed Rizvi, Mike Schaub, Harrison Wang, Yu-Lin Yang, Matthew Yeh, and James Zhou.

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