Par excellence

VERTEX also took home the Innovate Award, which celebrated the team’s “ingenuity, creativity and inventiveness to make their designs come to life.” The weekend continued a stellar season for the team, which had ranked first in the state and scored seven of the 10 highest scores in competition overall.

Vesely says the team has increased its efforts to train less experienced members and give them more hands-on opportunities to work with the robots. These efforts paid off during this year’s competition, when two new Exeter teams, Surface and Edge, competed at the state level for the first time. Team Surface won the third-place Control Award, which recognizes a team that “demonstrates innovative thinking to solve game challenges such as autonomous operation, improving mechanical systems with intelligent control, or using sensors to achieve better results.”

On the individual level, Deborah Ang ’24 was named one of two Dean’s List finalists to represent New Hampshire at the world championships. Ang serves as VERTEX’s mechanical lead. Riya Tyagi ’24 was a semifinalist. Inventor Dean Kamen founded FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, and hosted the inaugural competition in a high school gymnasium in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1992. Exeter is now among more than 3,700 high school teams and 46,000 students participating in STEM-related competitions sponsored by FIRST each year.  

Exeter’s Mock Trial Club has had a long track record of success in the New Hampshire State Mock Trial Championship, but this year’s teams outdid themselves. The Exeter teams swept the top three spots at the tournament, and all the individual awards went to Exonians. Michael Nardone ’24, Selim Kim ’24, Angela Zhang ’23 and Anderson Lynch ’23 won Outstanding Attorney, while Charles Potjer ’24, Matt Grossman ’25, David Goodall ’24 and Michael Hsieh ’23 took home honors for Outstanding Witness. In the finals of the tournament, Lynch, Hsieh, Nardone and Goodall joined forces with Tucker Gibbs ’23, Colin Jung ’24, Angelina Gong ’25 and Ethan Benenson ’26 to defeat another Exonian team by a total of just two points. They will represent New Hampshire at the National High School Mock Trial Championship in Little Rock, Arkansas, in May. 

Alan Bu ’24 traveled to southeastern Europe to compete in the 14th Romanian Master of Mathematics, which kicked off in Bucharest in late February. One of the most challenging high school mathematics competitions in the world, the invitation-only event included teams from 15 countries. Over two days, competitors worked through a set of six problems; the three highest individual scores from each country made up the country’s team score. Bu won a silver medal in the event, finishing 13th in a field of 90 contestants, and the U.S. team captured a first-place trophy in the overall competition. 

Though parliamentary debating is typically a team effort, Colin Jung ’24, captain of Exeter’s Daniel Webster Debate Society, competed as an individual at the highest level of world competition. In January, Jung captured the first-place individual title at a tournament at Choate Rosemary Hall, earning himself a spot at the World Individual Debating and Public Speaking Championship in Durban, South Africa, where he joined some 200 competitors from countries around the world in four events: persuasive speaking, interpretive reading, impromptu speaking and debating. After tackling a final-round resolution focusing  on the question of reparations for descendants of enslaved people, Jung finished fourth overall (and first among the U.S. delegation) in the debate category, reaching the level of “grand finalist.”