Jets - The Pre-Engineering Times

This month, we highlight a school that has participated in the JETS' TEAMS competition for many years and are the proud recipients of the first ever TEAMS Grand Prize Award. The grand prize is determined by combining Part I and Part II scores across all divisions and levels (varsity/jv). With a combined score of 431 points, the Wildcats secured this first ever award. On Tuesday, May 27, 2008, the president of the Milwaukee School of Engineering (where Libertyville competed in TEAMS) and JETS executive director will present the Libertyville varsity team with a $5,000 check and trophy for their significant accomplishment.

Libertyville Grand Prize Team:

Lisa Branding
Sarah Cheng
Eric Li
Sharon Lo
Margaret McCall
Julia Nee
Frank Yan
Yuli Zhu
Pete Dawson, Sponsor/Coach

The Libertyville team overcame some weaknesses, compensating for lower scores on the multiple-choice section (Part I) with stronger performances in the upper level challenges (Part II). Those sections allowed the LHS team to use other skills, like English language proficiency, to separate themselves form the rest of the field.

"That's the most impressive thing," Dawson said. Language use is "an under-rated skill. These types of events are a reflection of a lifetime of learning."

"TEAMS requires a lot of knowledge from a bunch of areas," Yan said. "The most useful thing is having learned a lot of things already. The competition draws upon pretty much our entire life before -- everything we've learned inside the classroom, outside the classroom. It helps that we've had challenging courses to take."

Yan became involved because the competition sounded interesting, and his friends were participating.

"I have always been generally interested in math and science," he said. "I like math beyond the basic fundamental things, to take it and apply it to problems in the real world."

"We've been participating in it for a while," said Dawson. "In the past five years, we've gotten national ranks in three years. This year we were named best overall, and that was over the top for us."

In addition, to securing the 2008 grand prize, the team placed 1st in varsity division 9 and the school also fielded a junior varsity team. Watch out next year as Libertyville will be poised to defend this year's title with another great team(s).

Member of the Libertyville JV team
Members of the Libertyville JV team

Libertyville Varsity Team Members