Notable Students

Earlier this year, the Technology Student Association competed at Ohio Northern University in their first ever TEAMS competition. Our teams were very successful, with the 9/10 division team ranking 2nd in the state and the 11/12 division team taking home the championship with a 1st place ranking!
Members of the 9/10 division team: Aksheet Dutta [freshman], Arkesh Das [freshman], Huron Tu [freshman], Josh Dong [freshman], Rishabh Dhubey [freshman], Vishesh Verma [freshman].
Members of the 11/12 division team: Srivatsav Bendi [freshman], Swarith Reddy [junior], Akul Gunukula [freshman], Sonnet Xu [freshman], Medha Jasti [freshman], Shubham Jha [sophomore], Gurish Sharma [senior], Nikhil Bajwa [junior].

Two of our students from Troy High won a first place in the "Detroit News Catch Scholarship!!!"  Kevin Zhou won in the area of Mathematics, and Jennifer Won won in the area of Vocational Technical.  

Congratulations to Student Awardees at Troy High School
Ambassador Awardees: Aleena Malik, Lance Moy, Aditi Prabhu, Sharanya Swaminathan, Alex Xu, Dorothy Yin, Jessie Zhou
Honor Awardees: Lisa (Seo Hyun) Baek, Amay Baweja, Michael Cui, Mariska Goswami, Nandita Jagan, Jennifer Lee, Abby Liang, Allison Liu, Lauren McIntyre, Esha Patel, Sejal Patil, Hrudy Peela, Chloe Pottenger, Vidhya Harini Srinivas, Arjun Tholakapalli, Cynthia Wang, Shauna Wang, Lily Yang, Christine Zeng, Katherine Zhao

Merit Awardees: Prisha Agnihotri, Aakifah Asifee, Rupal Athalye, Grace Booza, Shannon Cai, Rithvik Girish, Odelia Huang, Jemi Isaac, Annie Joseph, Isabelle Lamug, Ethan Lin, Shifa Malik, Noyonima Masud, Kyra McIntyre, Naina Nagar, Akanksha Nakum, Minji Nam, Khanh Vy O, Tanisha Panchal, Justin Park, Vivian Park, Varsha Penumalee, Neal Podhuturi, Purvi Raj, Ananya Ramanan, Alyssa Sayas, Ivy Shi, Molli Thibodeau, Nandika Vijayakumar, Nina Wang, Lily Wei, Helen Xiao, Angela Xu, Nancy Xu, Ruicheng Yang, Jiaying Zhou

Today, the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association announced that the Troy High Chariot Newspaper and 2019 Gladiator Yearbook both won “Gold Medal” recognition for the Spartan Awards.  The Chariot’s website also received a “Silver” recognition. These awards would not have been possible if it were not for YOU.  Whether students knocked on your doors during class to pull a student, interviewed you after school or over email, or halted class to distribute a newspaper, we truly appreciate your patience and support.

 

Students also placed in the following individual categories:

 

YEARBOOK:

Madelyn Holmes - Student Journalist Staff/Yearbook Design & (Honorable Mention) Yearbook Verbal/Sports Feature Writing

Briana Scillion & Emily Moore - (1st Place) Yearbook Visual/Business Advertisements

Jaclyn Miller - (1st Place) Yearbook Visual/Academic Photo

Sabrina Seldon & Emily Moore - (2nd Place) Yearbook Verbal/Personality Profile

 

NEWSPAPER:

Kaitlyn Piggott - (1st Place) In-Depth Feature, (1st Place) Personal Narrative, (Honorable Mentions) Front Page Design, Story Package, Personality Profile, Diversity Coverage, and Environmental/Health/Science Writing

Olivia Perron - (1st Place) Front Page Design, (1st Place) Sports Action Photo, (Honorable Mention) Sports Feature Photo

Meriam Meram - (2nd Place) Personality Profile, (Honorable Mention) Online Breaking News Coverage

Murryum Farooqi - (Honorable Mention) Online Breaking News Coverage

Chloe Collins - (3rd Place) Environmental Portrait

Andy DeGrand (Honorable Mention) Informative Feature

Jess Geisler, Olivia Perron & Lola Pinneo - (Honorable Mention) Editorial Opinion Page or Spread

Vanisa Kumar, Gabby DeRose, Lola Pinneo & Emy Galustyan - (Honorable Mention) Editorial Opinion Page or Spread

AJ Kowalak, Ping-Yu Hsu, Kaitlyn Piggot & Olivia Perron - (Honorable Mention) News Page or Spread

 

Special congratulations to our current Chinese 3 students, Katie Austin, Michael Cui, Sachin Ramchandran, and Ethan Feng for winning the 2nd place in 2020 Cheng & Tsui Superstar Karaoke Contest.  Their group name is "Beijing Boys" and their performance of 《Radical 86 火》really stood (out of a whopping 59 entries), both to the panel of judges and to the public.  As the 2nd place winner, their group has won a $250 Cheng & Tsui gift certificate for our Chinese program. This prize will help further enrich our students’ language studies.  You can view their video here, or click the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdLe9C5TYik

 

 

Congratulations to our Econ Club! They placed 2nd in the state in the "Adam Smith Division" (AP level competition). The team consisted of four juniors: Amol Kirtane, Kevin Kim, Alankar Shende, and Alex Xu.

 

• Niheera Aedla
• Michelle Baek
• Arlene Chen
• Sneha Dinda
• Priya Dutta
• Nicole Kim
• Nate Kovacs
• Sofia Liang
• Aileen Liu
• Dhatri Medarametla
• Apoorva Mirji
• Monish Moyal
• Avani Prasad
• Purvi Raj
• Navneet Ramadurai
• Saakshi Sovani
• Claire Wu
• Jasmine Wu
• Katherine Zhao
• Isabella Vitanovich
• Victoria Jan

Anisha Aggarwal	Kenneth Gu	Vandhana Purushothaman
Deepti Aggarwal	Catherine Hu	Dipika Rao
Shrey Aggarwal	Victoria Jan	Surya Sanjay
Akarsh Alapati	Srikar Kante	Pratham Soni
Amogh Angadi	Abdulmoiz Khaja	Siddhanth Soni
Lisa Baek	Hyun Kim	Thejas Thota
Hitha Bathala	Jaewoo Kim	Chaitanya Vadlamudi
Sanya Chawla	Euiyeon Lee	Rebecca Varghese
Teresa Chen	Shannon Li	Isabella Vitanovich
Edison Chiu	Elayni Liu	Allison Wei
Ryan Dong	Meera Manek	Theresa Wei
Denise Fajardo	Noyonima Masud	Bright Xu
Cecelia Fan	Rithvik Mohanarangan	Dorothy Yin
Sameep Gawaskar	Sejal Patil	Kiana Yin
Mariska Goswami	Shreya Pawar	Carol Zhang
Amogh Gowda	Rishyanth Peela

Steam Sisters, a community problem solving team from Troy and Rochester, has won the first place for their project for their Senior CMPs Education category at the Future Problem Solving International Conference held last weekend at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Their project focused on educating middle school girls on the topics of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. There are 11 girls from Troy High School, Apoorva Mirji, Anna Ji, Angela Li, Abby Liang, Elin Lee, Nicole Kim, Purvi Raj, Parvathi Nagappala, Prajna Polamarasetti, and Sejal Patil.   Aishwarya Arvind from International Academy East, Julia Voyt from Athens High School and Rhea Narayan from Rochester High School, are also a part of the team. 

Gina Moy, junior at Troy High School, was recently named the 2019 Champion in the <18 Concert Percussion category of the Hit Like a Girl contest.  Moy’s entry was Hinger’s Opus 1 on timpani; you can view her entry here:  https://youtu.be/ZgMrcAYix58.  Hit Like a Girl is an annual international contest for female drummers and percussionists. Its purpose is to spotlight female drummers/percussionists and encourage drumming and musicianship for girls and women.   In its eighth year, the competition featured hundreds of entries in five categories from more than 50 countries with Moy besting entrants from Poland, Indonesia, Austria and the United States.  Gina says of her accomplishment, “I would like to thank Mr. Nutting, Mr. Greenwood and my private instructors for their huge support of my musical endeavors, and I hope this might encourage young students, especially girls, to pursue music and percussion.”

Congratulations to Matthew Dong, Amogh Angadi and Pratham Soni for making it to the Quiz Bowl Nationals in Atlanta, Georgia.

Biology Competitions Club seniors Finsam Samson and Yujie Wang are one of 5 national team finalists in the Genes in Space competition. They will now receive mentorship from MIT and Harvard PhD scientists, attend Biology Space Camp this summer, present their research at a science conference, and compete to have their proposed DNA experiment carried out on the International Space Station.

Congratulations to the winners of the 4th Troy High Short Story Writing Contest.
First Place: Rules to a Weapon by Tracy Li
Second Place: falling by Pallavi Chigurupati
Third Place: Snatched Time by Sandhya Srinivasan

We are the Troy United Archery team run by Troy High students Sanjana Chimalakonda, Aarti Phatke, and Siya Gupta. We started this club earlier this year as a enrichment program that is open to Troy high, Athens, and IA. We have been preparing for the past few months for a highschool state tournament for teams like us called the Michigan Archery High School Associations’s State tournament, which happened today at Harrison highschool. We wanted to let you know that the  tournament was a great success! We had five members from our team place in the top thee positions for their divisons and overall, we had a amazing time. We also were the highest ranking team and placed first statewide in the elite division.  We also became very popular throughout the tournament and had multiple people complement us on our coordination and togetherness as well as our skill. We made great a acquaintance with the tournament director and the other judges who said they would be looking forward to see us next year.

Biology Competitions Club president, Jason Zhang placed 3^rd in the 2019 National Biology Competition making him an “International Biology Scholar with Distinction”. Over 1,300 students competed in this competition from 92 international schools. Jason will receive a cash prize and is eligible for a partial scholarship to the University of Toronto.

Congratulations to Prashanti Donthireddy who earned a perfect score on ACT (April 2019).

On Friday, May 3, four Troy High Students traveled to UD Mercy  for the Michigan CyberPatriot Banquet to receive their award for finishing in 2nd Place Michigan Gold Division  in the CyberPatriot Competition.  The students, Saumyaa Sinha, Archana Matheswaran, Steffanie Joy, and Kenneth Gu went through 3 rounds of competition, each time placing near the top of all Michigan competitors.  Cyberpatriot is a youth cyber program created by the Air Force Association to inspire k-12 students towards careers in cybersecurity.  This competion is held annually and this is the first year of competition for our team from Troy High.  Congratulations to these students for all their hard work and effort!

This past weekend 23 forensics students competed at the State tournament which they had qualified for previously. If you have these students please join me in congratulating them on an awesome showing . Our Shrek Multiple took FIRST place  in the state and it was the most talked about event the entire  competition- hearing people in hallways saying, “Go see Shrek perform -they are amazing” –was fun for me and I am sure their parents 😊 Students in Shrek are: Trinh Pafford- Sean Hodges-Shane Held-Hannah Cheshire -Traci Li- Elise Plane and Ravi Joseph

Other notables – Prisha Grover took 6^th in impromptu- 1 min to prep an unknown topic and she must speak for 5 min – she is amazing – ask her to do it for you😊- Sonia Ahmed was 7^th in dramatic interp, Maggie Huber 10 in Prose , Dhruv Muralidhar 12th in oratory and Apoorva Mirji 12 in informative.  Our team was 8^th in the state which is also quite an accomplishment given the number of teams.

Please join me in congratulating the following students for their performance at DECA Internationals over the past 5 days in Orlando. Troy High students performed outstandingly well and I wanted them to be recognized for their efforts.
Michael Song & Aniket Dagar placed 3rd internationally in their event, Sports & Entertainment Marketing. They received the coveted “DECA Glass” award for their overall role play and test performance. They had the opportunity to stand on the DECA podium for top 3 finalist at the International Grand Awards Show.
Jahow Yu, Raghav Maini, Navneet Ramadurai and Allison Wei all placed in the Top 10 internationally for their events in Hospitality & Tourism and Business Management & Administration. 
Dheeraj Kakulavarum, Jennifer Won and Evan Tondera all placed in the Top 20 internationally for their events in the Hospitality & Tourism industry.
Ella Brandenberg, Jennifer Won, Raghav Maini, Jahow Yu, Dheeraj Kakulavarum, Navneet Ramadurai, Jack Kotas, Collin McManus and Min Lee were also presented with medals at the preliminary awards show for their high role play and testing scores. 
In total, Troy High received 2 glass plaques and 27 medals at the international level! It was an outstanding awards day for our club. 
It was a very exciting time to see this many students from Troy High on stage receiving awards from DECA at an International competition.

Neha Aigalikar, with her team, won 2nd place in the State level Future Problem Solving tournament. She also participated in individual writing and came in 4th place. They will now proceed to National tournament in Boston.

Pratham Soni, Junior, founded a non profit project organization tech2serve (tech2serve.org) in summer of 2018. The purpose and mission of tech2serve is to bring life changing technology to uplift under served communities through education, life preservation, and connectivity. Through Fall of 2018, Pratham raised over $4,000 to fund his organization. Using the funds he collaborated with a California based organization that develops software that enables the visually impaired to access education through talk to speech technology. Pratham then worked with two large educational institutions in India to identify visually impaired students who would benefit from use of this technology. He traveled to India over the Christmas break, and 101 visually impaired students were provided with cell phones and mp3 players with custom software loaded on the devices that enables these students to pursue higher education. The technology brought to these  students by Prahtam also improves their lifestyle with independence to navigate the streets, order food, message friends and families. Another project that tech2serve has been involved with is bringing CPR awareness among the elderly. He traveled through senior citizen homes demonstrating the basics of CPR and the benefits of it in emergency. For his exceptional service to others through his projects, Pratham was honored by the Troy Youth Assistance at their Annual Youth Recognition Awards on April 17th. He was awarded the Silver Star Award for exceptional service and example in the community of Troy.

From over 10,000 students, Biology Competitions Club president Jason Zhang scored in the top 20 students nationwide for the USA Biology Olympiad. This is the second year in a row that Jason scored in the top 20. He will now compete at the USA Biology Olympiad National Finals at the University of California in San Diego from June 22^nd to July 4^th for a chance to represent the USA at the international level.

Our THS/AHS robotics team has competed very well in the past 2 months. Our season's accomplishment culminated in

• The robot advancing to semi-finals at Michigan State Championship (10 days ago)
• Winning Michigan State Championship Chairman's Award
• Ranking 30th out of 542 Michigan teams (see http://frc-districtrankings.firstinspires.org/2019/FIM , our team is called 226 Hammerheads representing both THS and AHS).

In FIRST Robotics, the Chairman's Award is the most prestigious award. It honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the mission of FIRST. Our team has won the Chairman's Award 3 years in a row at the district level, but this is the first time for us wining at the State Championship level. We hope to repeat the same this week at the World Championship where 400 teams from around the world will be competing at Cobo Center. 

Here's a brief video of our 150 lb. robot at the State Championship's playoff. During the end game, our robot (in blue color with red 226 bumpers, on the left side of the screen) does a climb onto a 19" platform: https://youtu.be/ju1bWyzMPnc?t=128

Congratulations to our band and orchestra students! -  Orchestra played brilliantly in Toronto, earning First Place in two categories, and Superior Ratings for all groups.  All five Troy Bands (Cadet, Concert, Symphonic, Jazz and Marching) earned “Superior” ratings, with the Symphonic Band and Jazz Ensemble placing “Best In Category” (the Jazz Ensemble received the highest overall score of all performing groups). 

Congratulations Apoorva Mirji! She won a Troy Garden Club 2019 garden walk high school honorable mention. 

Congratulations Sandhya Manivasagam! She won two Troy Garden Club 2019 garden walk high school honorable mentions. 

On Saturday, March 30, 2019, the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) held its annual Michigan Affiliate Award Celebration at the Eberhard Center on the campus of Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Of the 79 award winners from Michigan, 3 were students at Troy High School.  Senior Claire Yang, Junior Lydia Tan, and Sophomore Lily Yang were recognized for the aspirations to work in the field of technology.  These three young ladies proudly represented Troy High School and have promising opportunities in their future!  Congratulations Claire, Lydia, and Lily!

Troy High was represented by 2 teams at the Washington University Chemistry Tournament (WUCT), held at the Washington University in St Louis on April 6th. 43 teams from across the US competed in this annual competition. 

Team 1 consisting of Pratham Soni, Jaewoo Kim, Edison Chiu, Kevin Wang, Kevin Zhou and Benjamin Liu placed 5th in the Breaking Bonds Competition and 8th place in the Cumulative Director's Award. 

HOSA State Conference Results 2019

• Amogh Angadi- 1st place in Nutrition
• Shrey Aggarwal- 1st place in Epidemiology
• Srijani Sengupta- 1st place in Human Growth and Development
• Sohan Vittalam, Katherine Zhao, Jasmine Wu, and Allison Wei- 1st place in Biomedical Debate
• Jane Kim- 2nd place in Home Health Aide
• Navneet Ramadurai- 2nd place in Job Seeking Skills
• Kenneth Gu- 3rd place in Medical Law and Ethics
• Pratham Soni- 3rd place in Biomedical Laboratory Science
• Divya Aggarwal- Finalist (4th place) in Medical Law and Ethics
• Sophia Liang- Finalist (4th place) in Medical Terminology
• Elliot Liu- Finalist (4th place) in Pharmacy Science
• Mridul Akasapu- Finalist (5th place) in Nutrition
• Sneha Dinda- Finalist (6th place) in Biomedical Laboratory Science
• Viji Jambunathan, Kaylin Jung, Sara Huang, Tiffany Guo, James Gu, Jason Zhang, Peter Nam, and Matthew Yao- Finalist (6th place) in Parliamentary Procedure
• Allison Liu- Finalist (7th place) in Sports Medicine
• Yuvraj Jamwal, Marvin Jiang, and Michael Song- Finalist (7th place) in Public Health
• Rishyanth Peela- Finalist (8th place) in Pharmacology
• Priya Dutta, Dhatri Medarametla, Arlene Chen, and Michelle Baek- Finalist (8th place) in Existing Medical Innovation

The Troy United High School Figure Skating “B” Team won first place In the Michigan State Competition for the second year in a row after winning first place in their District.  The team consisted of Rachel Burke and Sophie White from Troy High and Lauren Ferguson, Joy Liao and Emily Rosinski from Athens High School.  The “C” team placed seventh at the Michigan State Competition after finishing second in their District. The “C” team consists of Kristina Chen from Troy High,  Sydney Richardson from Athens and Deena Aboul-Hassan from International Academy.  The Coach for both the B and C teams is Christina Polychronou, who is a Troy High School graduate. 

Troy High School has been ranked first place in the American Mathematics Competition 12A (AMC-12A) which was held on Feb 7th. It's a wonderful achievement as there are more than 1,700 public and private schools in the US.  In addition, Freddie Zhao and Reagan Choi got perfect scores on the exam; two of only 20 perfect scores out of 33,400 total test-takers.  Along with several other Troy High students, they will continue to participate in invitational exams as a part of the MAA math competition series.

This past weekend the Troy High Model UN Delegation competed in its last conference for the collegiate season. They attended conferences these last couple months at Oakland University (2-day competition), Wayne State University (1-day competition), and at Michigan State University (3-day competition).  It was at Michigan State University's conference that our delegation took home the coveted and prestigious Best Large Delegation Award!  An award that we have not won in a couple years.

Each conference challenges the students to prepare in different ways as they have unique requirements and procedures the delegates have to adhere to; some have been preparing since September for these conferences.

If you have any of the students below please congratulate them for their hard work and success:

OAKLAND UNIVERSITY:

30 1st/2nd year students competed against Varsity delegations from 20 other schools

Avani Prasad, 10th Grade	Superior Delegate Award (2nd Place)
Angela Li, 10th Grade	Excellent Delegate Award (3rd Place)
Kevin Kim, 10th Grade	Excellent Delegate Award (3rd Place)

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY: 
51 students competed against 193 delegates from 13 other schools

Highest Honors - Best Delegate:	2nd Place - Outstanding Delegate:	3rd Place - Honorable Mention:
Eliya Imtiaz, 12th grade	George Azar, 12th grade	Howie Wang, 10th grade
Allison Wei, 10th grade	Ridaa Khan, 10th grade	Areez Ahmed, 10th grade
Allison Liu, 10th grade	Om Shah, 10th grade	Alankar Shende, 11th grade
Niheera Aedla, 10th grade	Jahow Yu, 12th grade	Avani Prasad, 10th grade
Olivia Simone, 12th grade		Jyothika Vijay, 10th grade
Sharanya Swaminathan, 9th grade		Kevin Kim, 10th grade
Viji Jambunathan, 12th grade		Shreya Rudagi, 10th grade

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY: 
39 students competed against 850 delegates from 40 different schools

*THS delegation was awarded the BEST LARGE DELEGATION AWARD!

Highest Honors - Best Delegate:	2nd Place - Outstanding Delegate:	3rd Place - Honorable Mention:	4th Place - Verbal Commendation:
Olivia Simone, 12th grade (1st year club member)	Eliya Imtiaz, 12th grade	Hari Sanil, 11th Grade	Justin Fernando, 12th grade
Noihrita Masud, 12th grade	Amrita Uma, 11th grade	Aileen Liu, 9th grade	Molly Capelli, 11th grade
	George Azar, 12th grade	Kevin Kim, 10th Grade	Chloe Pottenger, 10th grade
	Niheera Aedla, 10th grade	Shreya Powar, 10th grade	Jahnavi Bhatt, 12th grade
	Elise Kennedy, 10th grade	Allison Wei, 10th grade	Aniket Dagar, 12th grade
	Sharanya Swaminathan, 9th grade	Angela Li, 10th grade	Jahow Yu, 12th grade
		Alankar Shende, 11th grade

The Troy Entrepreneurship Club traveled to Eastern Michigan University and competed in the Skandalaris Business Plan Competition.  This year, Aimee Zheng and Sid Lakhani came home with the first place in business plan and presentation skills for their plan called Onconomiks.

Biology Competitions Club and AP Biology students competed in the USA Biology Olympiad and five Troy High students are progressing to the semifinals. Over 5,000 students competed and these students scored in the top 10% nationwide: Kenneth Gu, Pratham Soni, Andrew C. Wang, Jasmine Wu, and Jason Zhang. They will be competing next week to try and qualify for nationals, the top 20 students in the nation. In another Biology Competitions Club competition, Junior Science Humanities Symposium (JSHS), Astha Dalal won 1st place in Michigan and Matthew Dong won 4th place for presenting their scientific research to an audience and judges at Wayne State University. They will be traveling to nationals in Albuquerque, NM April 24-27.

At the Science and Engineering Fair of Metro Detroit (SEFMD) where students present their scientific research posters to judges, team members Peizhi Liu and Kevin Zhou earned the top honor as Grand Award Winners. They will now travel to Phoenix, AZ from May 12-17 to compete at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. In addition, several Troy High students earned additional honors: Amol Kirtane (1^st place), Matthew Dong (2^nd place), Astha Dalal (4^th place), Pratham Soni (4^th place), Divya Aggarwal (Excellence Award).      

Astha Dalal (11th grade) has secured first place at JSHS- Junior Science Humanity Symposium this year

More good News from last Saturday! Some non-Chinese heritage students participated in 2019 Michigan China Quiz Bowl at Wayne State University, and they did an amazing job. Please congratulate them if you see them on  this great achievement!

High School Division 1: (Coach: Sue Lin)

1st Place Winners:  Bret Dickerson, Brandon Nguyen, Joseph Slaviero 

3rd Place Winners:  Eva Jaku, Dasha Safronova, Vishesh Verma (These three Boulan Park  

                                     Middle School students are taking Chinese 1 at Troy High.) 

 

Division 2: (Coach: Meiyu Chang)

4th Place Winners:  Caden Chambo, Seonghyo Kim

 

Division 3: (Coach: Meiyu Chang)

1st Place Winners:  Phoebe Oh, Imani Rinke, Sarah Shakhloul 

3rd Place Winners:  Minseong Kim, Swarith Reddy, Joshua Vijayasegar

 

Division 4: (Coach: Sue Lin)

1st Place Winners:  Nathaniel Drasovean, Molly Capelli, Shruthi Sunilkumar

 

Art Contest

Poster Category

  1st Place:  Jong Won Choi

  2nd Place:  Rema  Shkoukani

 

3-D Category

  1st Place:  Semi Park

  3rd Place:  Justin Park

 

T-Shirt Category

  2^nd Place:  Mikayla Anderson

Yesterday was the annual Japan Quiz Bowl competition at UM, Ann Arbor.  We had two teams from Level 1 class and one team from Level 3 class.  All three teams brought home a trophy for their wins.  The two level 2 teams ended up competing each other in the final round.  😊  This is the first time ever for Troy High Japanese classes to win trophies at Japan QB!  Moreover, ALL of them brought one home!  They all worked hard to prepare for the event.  Please congratulate all the students below for their hard work. 

Division 3

1^st Place:  Marcus Chung, Chloe Pottenger, Rishi Rallapalli, Teagan Walters

 Division 1

1^st Place:  Diana Kim (Jihyeon), Skyla Lee (Seeun), Lachlan O’Neill, Heejin Shyn

 Division 1

2^nd Place:  Nicholas Griffin, Sebit Paik, Rohit Rajala

This past weekend Troy High DECA spent their time competing at the State Conference at Cobo Center. 74 students represented Troy High over the course of a 2-day competition. 

Out of those 74 students, 47 of them were called up on stage to receive an award for either their test or role play performance. Troy High received 42 role play medals, 14 test medals and 39 finalist medals. 

Troy High had 17 students qualify to attend International Competition in Orlando, Florida late April. 

A few standouts from the crowd: Navneet Ramadurai, Jahow Yu, Angela Li, Evan Tondera and Allison Wei all “swept” their category, which means they placed first in their category for all of their competitive events which included 1 test and 2 role-plays.

The following students qualified for International Competition - please congratulate them if you have them in class:  Jahow Yu, Raghav Maini, Michael Song, Aniket Dagar, Angela Li, Marina Sun, Jennifer Won, Allison Wei, Navneet Ramadurai, Dheeraj Kakulavaram, Jack Kotas, Lily Renke, Ella Brandenberg, Aditi Jain, Ambika Thirupathi, Evan Tondera, Kenneth (Kenny) Gu 

Several other students received amazing scores, simply losing out a spot at Internationals by just a few heartbreaking points. DECA has students compete in flights and several of our students who qualified for Internationals last year were unfortunately placed against other students who qualified last year as well. Unlucky flight draw in many cases.

Congratulations to Lydia Tan, Julia Considine, Paula Delgado, Emy Galustyan, Abigail Liang, Divya Shankar, Tiffany Xu and Lily Yang for their recognition in the 2019 Scholastic Art and Writing competition, Southeastern Michigan Art Region.

Congratulations Sandhya Srinivasan, senior, who recently won the 2018 Stephen Bonga Award for Prose for a short story. The story was also published in the same magazine that hosted the Stephen Bonga Award writing contest.

Congratulations Environmental Activist Club, they have moved from a “green” school, to an “emerald” green school.

Congratulations Darren Zeng, 10th grader. He recently received a Gold Key in 2019 Scholastic Art Writing Awards of Southeastern Michigan Art Region.

Congratulations to Amogh Gowda! Gift of Life Michigan has chosen him to receive a prestigious 2019 Champion award for promoting organ and tissue donation in the work he does as a volunteer. He is the only volunteer in Michigan to receive this honor.

Gina Moy was selected to participate in the Julliard summer percussion program.  She is one of only 16 selected across the country.

Congratulations to our National Merit Finalists!

On January 27, Finsam Samson, a senior at Troy, took first place in the 2019 Brain Bee at MSU competition. We are very excited to send Finsam off to the National Brain Bee at Penn State Medical School the weekend of April 12-14 where he will compete in written and oral testing rounds, as well as sessions on neuroanatomy, neurohistology, and patient diagnosis. A press release can be found on the Brain Bee at MSU website.

 

Congratulations to Michael Song for being named a MHSAA Scholar-Athlete! https://www.mhsaa.com/News/Press-Releases/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/7954/Scholar-Athlete-Award-Recipients-Announced-In-Class-A

 

Troy High’s Ocean Bowl Team competed Feb. 2 at UM in the Great Lakes Bowl.  The team of Matthew Dong, Pratham Soni, Jasmine Wu, Carol Zhang, and Allan Zhou took first place and will compete in the National Ocean Sciences Bowl in Washington DC in April.

 

Congratulations Avani Prasad (9th grade) for winning 4 Scholastic  Awards in the MidWest Region!  She received an honorable mention for her painting and three of her writing pieces received a Silver Key. 

 

The Model UN Students did exceptionally well this weekend at the University of Chicago International Conference.  This year out of the 16 Troy High delegates 15 received awards, 7 of which received Outstanding Delegate (1st place).   They competed against 131 schools and over 3,000 students both domestic and international.

 

Andrew Tabaka earned the Rank of Eagle with the Boy Scouts this week. His project was building 3 little lending libraries in front of Leonard Elementary and in it's neighborhoods. 

 

The SAA released their 2018 fall all-sportsmanship teams this week, recognizing student-athletes who displayed outstanding sportsmanship over the course of their seasons.  Among those honored were Troy's Lindsey Bolas, a graduate of Troy High School, who competes on the Oglethorpe Women's soccer team.

 

Congratulations to Amogh Gowda who was selected as a Distinguished Finalist for the state of Michigan in the 2019 Prudential Spirit of Community Awards! 

 

Natania Shi, entered her work into the Scholastic Arts and Writing competition. On Friday, she was awarded a Silver Key for a poem she wrote! Silver key recipients are awarded to the top 7-15% of entries.

 

Congratulations to Hemanth Tadepalli, Senior, he was appointed as a representative for the Troy City Planning Commission.

 

Congratulations to Roger Wang on being named the winner in the East Central Division MTNA Competition "Junior Performance." 

 

Troy High DECA competed at District competition this past Saturday and had an excellent showing! 92 students competed with 74 studentsadvancing to DECA State Competition in March at Cobo Center. 

 77 Troy High students made it on stage to receive a test, role play or state placement medallion. 

 We also had some very exciting scores on Saturday - Rachel Wu, Zahra Ahmad, Jahow Yu & Raghav Maini all received perfect scores on their role play. Students who received the top test scores for Troy High were Jahow Yu, Raghav Maini, Navneet Ramadurai, Kenneth (Kenny) Gu and Allison Wei. 

 

Boulan Park Middle School robotics team, PixelBotics FTC 11394, had a good season participating in the FIRST Tech Challenge this fall. The team won the Winning Alliance Award, the Rockwell Collins Innovative Award and qualification for the MI State Championship during the Bedford Qualifier on November 10^th 2018. They also won the Inspire Award and the Finalist Alliance Award at the Farmington Hills Qualifier on Dec. 8, 2018. The team made it to semifinals at the MI State Championship. PixelBotics also won first place and the highest score in OCCRA (Oakland County Competitive Robotics Association) Bloomfield Hills Tournament on Nov. 7,2018.

The team consists of three 8^th graders, Jonathan Chen, Justin Choi and Tyler Yee from Boulan Park Middle School. They also have two Troy High students and Hammerheads FRC 226 members, Angela Xu, Ethan Chen, and an Athens student, Jessica Zhang, as youth mentors, who have contributed greatly to the success of PixelBotics this season.

 

Congratulations Freddie Zhao for being named a Coca-Cola semifinalist!

 

Freddie Zhao (senior) and Reagan Choi (9th) attended Princeton University Mathematics Competition (PUMaC) by forming a team with six other students around the southeast area of Michigan.  They ranked 6th overall among the 40 teams in Division A, and also ranked 2nd in their 'team round'. Also, Freddie and Reagan were selected as finalists, top 10 scorers in each four topics in math; Algebra, Combinatorics, Number theory and Geometry (Only two from Michigan). 

 

PUMaC is a 13 year old math competition that is run by the math club in Princeton university, and became one of the most popular and challenging high school math competition run by university in the US. More than 60 teams who were carefully selected by their past achievement from other math competitions competed each other this year. Past competitors have been admitted to some of the best universities in the world, including Princeton and its peers.

 

The new Troy High Sailing Team is ranked 64 in their district!

 

Congratulations to Aadharsh Acharya, Senior, who received a perfect score of 36 on the ACT!

 

Congratulations National Merit Semi Finalists! Aadharsh Acharya, Priyal Bajaj, Michael Davis, Nathaniel Drasovean, Aaron Feng, Tiffany Guo, Kevin Huang, Sara Huang, Vijayashree Jambunathan, Sibbharat Koripella, David Kuang,Preethi Kumaran, Peizhi Liu, Raghav Maini, Marina Malyarenko, Iman Manzoor, Renuka Murthi, Yong Jin Nam, Marion Ni, Kulin Oak, Vasanth Palanisamy, Sisir Potluri, Finsam Samson, Srijani Sengupta, Prashant Shankar, Zenon Stepien, Hansen Wang, Matthew Wang, Yujie Wang, Kimberly Xing, Claire Yang, Matthew Yao, Jahow Yu, Hanchi Zhang, Jason Zhang, Frederick Zhao

 

Harikrishnan Sanil (Grade-11, Troy High), has won laurels at the International Geography Olympiad and World History Bee championships in Berlin, Germany.  He was part of Team-USA, representing the United States and won two medals – a Gold Medal in Berlin Treasure Hunt & Geography Quiz (Junior Varsity); and a Bronze Medal in Berlin Conference Simulation (Junior Varsity). This was the grand finale, the culmination of a year-long series of exams (written & practical), quizzes and several other competitions in various formats at state, national and international levels. Coach: Sanil Neelakantan

 

Congratulations to Anish Kotnis, Senior, who received a perfect score of 36 in the ACT!

 

 

Jason Zhang (11th grader) is one of the top 20 students in the United States for the USA Biology Olympiad exam (nearly 10,000 students competed!). He will now travel to San Diego in June for 10 days to compete for a spot on the USA team (top 4 in the US) which then competes at the International Biology Olympiad in Iran. https://www.cee.org/events/usabo-finalists-announced

 

We are very pleased to let you know that Pratham Soni and Matthew Dong, Sophomores competed at the 2018 Intel Science and Engineering Fair last week in Pittsburgh. Over 1,800 students from the world (80+ countries) competed in what is the highest level of STEM research based science fair for high school students in the world. Their work: Context-Aware Medical Image Super-Resolution Using Convolutional Neural Networks, was awarded Second Place by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

 

Your athlete, Morgan McDonald (Lacrosse) has been selected as a nominee for the Detroit Free Press Sports Awards!

 

Congratulations! You have been awarded the 2018 Sutton Foster Ovation Award® for BEST DIRECTION for your production of The Addams Family!

 

I am writing to congratulate one of your students, Kevin Li, for his second place finish in the Bloomfield Hills Financial Stock to Scholarship Challenge. We had 400 students from the tri-county area participate this year in a stock trading game from 2/5-4/13 with a pseudo $100,000 brokerage account. His final account value was $115,649.72- and during the game, the S&P 500 was only 0.27% (essentially, flat).

 

This in itself is a great accomplishment. Yet he also won second place in our 2015 contest during his freshman year, and again second place his sophomore year in 2016!! The odds of that happening are just outrageous.

 

On behalf of the Council for Economic Education (CEE), congratulations on your team’s success for making it to the Finals of the National Economics Challenge^SM!  We look forward to hosting your team in New York City,May 19^th – May 21^st, 2018 to compete for the title of National Champions.

 

Below are the names of the four students who will represent your school at the Finals:

 

 

Congratulations to Anerudh Bharani and Marcus Chung. Both these young men successfully passed piano student achievement tests this year.

 

A follow up to this past weekend at the State Forensics Tournament – We placed 8^th overall – out of about 50 teams—and students with individual honors were:

 

Maggie Huber – FR – 13^th place Children’s Storytelling

 

Prisha Grover – JR -  5^th Impromptu

 

Dhruv Muralidhar SO  3^rd Oratory  

 

and  

Katie Tenniswood- SO

Mallory Boque-SO

Anna Klingler-SO

Trinh Pafford –JR

Sean Hodges –SO

Shane Held -SO

Robert Stout -SO

Were all part of our Multiple and took 2^nd place.

 

The Troy High DECA students are easing back into school today having returned from 5 days in Atlanta, Georgia for the International Career Development Conference competition. 

 

Troy High had AMAZING results at the competition with 11 students called up on stage to receive competition medals.

 

22 Troy High students competed with 12,000 students from the United States, Canada, Guam and Puerto Rico. If you happen to have the following students in class, please give them a high five or pat on the back - to place at this level is truly an excellent achievement. 

 

Quinn Favret & Kaylee Won: Medaled for placing in the top 10 in the nation 

Raghav Maini: Medaled for placing in the top 10 in the nation 

Marina Sun: Medaled for placing in the top 10 in the nation

Erin McManus & Nisha Bhargava - Medaled for placing in the top 20 in the nation

Runxuan Jiang - Medaled for placing in the top 20 in the nation

Erin McManus & Nisha Bhargava - role play medal

Quinn Favret - test medal

Raghav Maini - test medal

Runxuan Jiang - 2 role play medals

Caitlyn Moon - test medal

Muyang Wang - test medal

Clare McAuliffe - role play medal

Dheeraj Kakulavaram - role play medal

 

 

The staffs of the Gladiator yearbook and Chariot newspaper brought home 58 individual awards for their work. Last year’s yearbook earned a Spartan Award with distinction– the highest honor given to a publication in the state. This year’s newspaper earned a gold medal with distinction.

 

Bianca Bucholtz, Emily Houde, and Logan Smith were all selected as members of the all-state journalism staff. In addition, Logan was also recognized as this year’s All-MIPA Yearbook winner which makes him the top yearbook student in the state.

 

Troy Youth Assistance (TYA) recognized many of our Troy High Students this past Wednesday for their contributions to the community! Congratulations to individual honorees Lily Aldinger, senior, Zachary Chbihi, freshman, Claire Hao, senior, Tessa Kaminski, senior, Sribharat Koripella, junior, and Shruthi Sunilkumar, sophomore. TYA also honored THS-affiliated groups Baker Alumni Coaching Science Olympiad Students,Leonard Elementary Cabin Leaders, and THS Peer Mediators.

 

Alex Hom (THS sophomore) recently earned his Eagle Scout rank with Boy Scout Troop 1707.  He worked 133 service hours over 15 months to create kitchen survival kits for a homeless shelter in Pontiac.  He is also a member of Order of the Arrow, the National Honor Society for Boy Scouts of America.

 

Congratulations to Apoorva Mirji! Apoorva won two prizes in the Troy Garden Club's 2018 art competition!  The the grand prize of $100 and also the high school second prize.  Youngeun Keum, Parker Scott and Anna Zhao won a Troy Garden Club 2018 garden walk art competition honorable mention award-high school.

 

The following Biology Competitions Club and/or AP Biology students are semifinalists in the USA Biology Olympiad: James Gu, Preethi Kumaran, Michael Song, Pratham Soni, Swarith Reddy, Finsam Samson, Hansen Wang, Claire Yang, and Jason Zhang. Over 5,300 students competed in the USABO open exam and these nine THS students scored in the top 10% of the nation and will now compete to be finalists.

 

Jacob Maher, a senior, earned the rank of Eagle Scout in Troop 1702.  His public service project involved raising money to provide backpacks & school supplies for elementary students in Detroit.  The Troy High Jazz Combo performed at his fundraising event and helped him raise nearly $4,000.

 

Richard Yang was recently named a 2018 Coca-Cola Scholar, one of 150 selected from a pool of over 90,000 initial applicants. He will receive a $20,000 scholarship award along with an all-expense paid trip to Atlanta from April 19-22 as part of the 2018 Scholars Weekend and Leadership Development Institute where he will meet the other scholars from around the US and grow as a leader. The scholarship seeks well-rounded, bright students who not only excel academically, but are also actively involved in their schools; these scholars are passionate and service-oriented, demonstrating a sustained commitment to bettering their community.

 

Richard Yang has been selected as one of 20 Most Valuable Student Elks Scholarship finalists from a pool of nearly 29,000 other applicants. He will receive a minimum scholarship award of $20,000 along with an all-expense paid trip to Chicago from April 26-29 to attend the Leadership Weekend. There he will meet the other finalists, develop as a leader, and interview for a chance to win one of the top prizes of $30,000, $40,000, or $50,000. The scholarship is sponsored by the Elks National Foundation, a charitable organization with other 2000 lodges around the US, which seeks to sponsor students with leadership skills and a passion to help their communities.

 

Kelley Liu received two gold keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards! 

 

On March 22-24, Troy High HOSA competed at the HOSA State Conference in Grand Rapids, with 51 students recognized as finalists in their events and 13 students placing top three to qualify for HOSA Nationals. A full list of finalists and national qualifiers are available on the school website. A huge congrats to our students for such outstanding achievements!

 

Claire Hao: 2nd

 

Surya Sanjay, Jasmine Wu, Harshini Padala: 6th

Arlene Chen, Dhatri Medarametla, Michelle Baek: 7th

 

Pratham Soni: 1st

Finsam Samson: 4th

 

Shrey Aggarwal: 1st

Bharat Koripella: 5th

 

Emily Wang, Michelle Li: 8th

 

Lauren Alberts: 4th

 

Srijani Sengupta: 2nd

Aimee Zheng: 4th

 

Hayley Cho, Sahita Gandra, Preethi Kumaran, Sahara Pinnu: 1st

Neha Kuchukalanti, Renuka Murthi, Anagha Srivatsa, Priyal Bajaj: 6th

 

Viji Jambunathan: 3rd

 

Rohit Goru: 3rd

Kevin Zhou: 6th

 

Katherine Lee: 6th

 

Amogh Angadi: 2nd

Mridul Akasapu: 7th

 

Neil Garg, Teja Pulavarthi, Stephen Kurapati, Daniel Won, Kamal Kadali, Marvin Jiang, Vaibhav Srinivasan: 7th

Daniel Zheng, Dhanush Bathala, Adithya Sanjay, Sid Lakhani, Muyang Wang, Ethan Lazrado: 8th

 

Claire Yang: 5th

 

Elena Renke: 2nd

 

Shannon Li: 1st

 

Jinxi Dam, Afriti Chinoy, Esha Ghosalkar: 7th

 

Priyanka Pulvender: 8th  

 

Amogh Gowda: 8th

 

 

A dominating performance by Troy High School during the 2018 Amerisure Michigan Economics Challenge as they brought home State Championships in both the David Ricardo and Adam Smith divisions. Each member of championship teams will receive $250 into a MESP 529 plan and an opportunity to qualify for one of 16 spots in the national finals in New York City this May!

 

We just received this email from our officers for Future Problem Solvers.  GO TROY COLTS!!! 
Parvathi Nagappala 

-3rd Place Middle Division Individual, with an invitation to internationals

Renuka Murthi-

-1st Place Senior Division Individual, with an invitation to internationals

-Semi-finalist Senior Division Scenario Writing

-2nd Place Team Senior Division, with an invitation to Internationals

-3rd Place Team Senior Division

  

Several THS students placed yesterday at the regional Science and Engineering Fair of Metro Detroit. Grand Award winners were Matthew Dong and Pratham Soni. They will now compete at Intel ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair) in Pittsburgh in May. https://student.societyforscience.org/intel-isef

 

Amol Kirtane, Finsam Samson, Jason Zhang, and Marvin Jiang placed first. Yujie Wangplaced second. These 5 students are all eligible to compete in the statewide Michigan Science Fair at Kettering University in April.

 

Freddie Zhao, Spencer Liu, Divya Aggarwal, and Dipika Rao placed third. Sara Huang, Shivani Konduru, Runxuan Jiang, and Priyanka Pulvender placed fourth. James Gu and Srijani Senguptaplaced fifth.

 

Congratulations to these Juniors for PERFECT ACT scores! Renuka Murthi, Nathaniel Drasovean, David Kuang , Yongjin Nam, Finsam Samson, Yujie Wang, Jason Zhang

 

I am very pleased to let you know that Matthew Dong and Pratham Soni (both sophomores), are the Grand Prize Winners at the 2018 Science and Engineering Fair of Metro Detroit (SEFMD) held at the Cobo Hall this week. As a result they will now be competing at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair at Pittsburgh in May.

 

DECA students competed this past weekend at the State Conference at Cobo Center in Detroit. Troy High had an outstanding showing with 22 students qualifying for International competition (listed below) in Atlanta this April. 

 

We also had 54 out of the 64 students that attended & competed up on stage at the awards show to receive an award for either their test performance, role-play performance or placing as a finalist in their category. Troy High received 22 plaques for students continuing on to International competition, 34 yellow ribbon medals (signifying top placement for role-plays), 18 blue medals (signifying top placement for test scores) and 39 red-white-blue medals (signifying top placement in their category). 

 

Muyang Wang also medaled in both the Mathematics & Economics Examinations, an extra competition that they offer at the State level.

 

It was a great day to be a Colt! If you see the students below, wish them luck for Internationals in Atlanta.

 

Students advancing to International Competition in Atlanta, Georgia:

 

Congratulations to James Ge, Rishy Peela, Anupam Gatta and Chakransh Kapasiya! They came in 6th place in the Michigan High School Chess Tournament.

 

Three Biology Competitions Club students are regional finalists for the South-East Michigan Junior Science & Humanities Symposium. Jason Zhang, 1st place regional JSHS finalist, Runxuan Jiang, 2^nd place and Astha Dalal, 4th place regional JSHS finalist, have received invitations to participate in the 56th National JSHS to be held in Hunt Valley, Maryland, May 2 – 5, 2018. 

 

Some non-Chinese heritage students participated in 2018 Michigan China Quiz Bowl at Schoolcraft College, sponsored by Wayne State University, and they did an amazing job. Please congratulate themon this great achievement!

 

Division I (Coach: Sue Lin)

Kunwoo Kim

Seonghyo Kim

Division II (Coach: Meiyu Chang)
2nd Place Winners
Dominic Marra
Phoebe Oh
Sarah Shakhloul
Jae Woo Kim

Division III (Coach: Meiyu Chang)
3rd Place Winners
Sophia Baik
Jieun Lee
Semi Park
Johnny Burns

Division IV (Coach: Sue Lin)

1^st Place Winners
Aadharsh  Acharya
Leya Chambo
Nathaniel Drasovean
Yong Jin Nam

 

Yejin Kim 
Vaibhav Srinivasan

Megan  Worrel

 

The Troy Entrepreneur Club attended the Sesi Conference last week.  Quinn Favret won first place for his business plan “Know Your Snow.”  He also won first place for presentation skills when he presented before everyone. 

 

 Kelley Liu  has been named a 2018 National YoungArts Foundation (YoungArts) Finalist in Writing, the organization’s highest honor.

 

Congratulations to Esha Ghosalkar! She was awarded the Governor’s Service award for Outstanding Volunteering work.

 

Congratulations to Astha Dalal, grade 10. She presented her research, “Towards a Non-Invasive Measurement of Cancer Stem Cells,” during a scientific meeting of Michigan Association of Physicians of Indian Heritage(MAPI). She won 2nd Place amongst the high school students.

 

Congratulations to Matthew Wang, Jason Zhang, Girish Muthumula, Hanson Wang, and James Gu. They just won the Science Bowl Championship title in the one and only region in Michigan over the past weekend.  The team will be representing Michigan to compete in the national competition, sponsored by Department of Energy, during the last week of April.  

 

Harikrishnan Sanil of Grade-10 had participated in the University of Toronto Model United Nations Conference, held in Toronto, Canada from Feb-08 through Feb-11. This year's conference was attended by nearly 1000 delegates from three continents. Hari was the Chinese Ambassador at the UN Security Council, working with other nations to adopt a two-state solution between Turks and Kurds and negotiating disarmament of biological weapons. Hari performed very well on all four days and won the "Best Delegate Award". The criteria for the award are: presentation skills, leadership quality, knowledge of topic, quality of contribution to debate, adherence to rules of procedure and country policy, quality of resolution, directive drafting and composure. Hari received a certificate along with a gavel and sound block at an Award Ceremony at University of Toronto.

 

Jonathan Wang, freshman, has recently qualified for the 2018 Junior Olympic Fencing National Championships this February in Memphis! Congratulations Jonathan! The Troy United Figure Skating Team had their second competition this week at the Suburban Macomb Ice Rink.  The team medaled in five of their six competitions, taking second place in two events and third in three others. Currently the B team is in first place in the division. Their next competition is in February.

 

We were thrilled to learn that six THS juniors have achieved perfects scores on the ACT test! Congratulations to Nathaniel Drasovean, David Kuang, Yongjin Nam, Finsam Samson, Yujie Wang, and Jason Zhang.

 

We had an absolutely amazing day at District Competition for DECA this past Saturday at Lake Orion High School. 71 students competed representing Troy High and 64 out of 71 qualified to move on to State Conference & Competition at Cobo Center in mid-March. 

 

We also had 41 of those students “Sweep” - which means they won every medal possible in their category (test score medal, role play score medal and state qualifying medal).

 

Grand totals for Troy High DECA:

 

 

 

Navneet Ramaduri, Swarith Reddy and Silas Yang all medaled for test scores and/or role play scores, but unfortunately did not qualify for state competition. 

 

 

Congratulations to Jessica Chen, Felix Liang, Kevin Xu, Tiffany Xu, Marcus Chung, and Jessica You. All placed in their paino divisions at the annual MAC Open Fall Classic Competition held at the Evola Music Center in Shelby Township on November 4-5, 2017.

THS has 9 Siemens semi-finalists this year. The Siemens Competition is one is the most prestigious research competitions. The finalists will be announced soon. Here is the website, the list is an attachment on the bottom: 

https://www.siemens-foundation.org/programs/the-siemens-competition-in-math-science-technology/2017-semifinalists/

 

THS has 3 siemens finalists! 

Congratulations to Nicholas Gajewski (11^th Grade/Junior). He bowled a 300 on Saturday 12/9/2017.

 

As some of you may know, the Troy Theatre Ensemble enters our 2 shows each school year in the National Youth Arts Awards competition.  The results of the 12th Annual National Youth Arts Awards for the 2016-2017 season were just released, and the Troy Theatre Ensemble earned 3 awards and 11 additional nominations!

 

Lead Actor in a Musical: Tyler Bouque as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls

Lead Actress in a Musical: Raagini Chandra as Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls 

Costume Design: Michael A. Gravame for Guys and Dolls

 

Lead Actor in a Musical: Sean Hodges as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls

Lead Actress in a Musical: Annie Rowbal as Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls

Lead Actor in a Play: Tyler Bouque as Tom Newton in Who Am I This Time?

Supporting Actor in a Play: Ibrahim Isaac as Harry Nash in Who Am I This Time?

Supporting Actress in a Play: Bianca Bucholtz as Doris Sawyer in Who Am I This Time?

Supporting Actress in a Play: Emily Lourim as Catherine in Who Am I This Time?

Supporting Actress in a Play: Annie Rowbal as Gloria in Who Am I This Time?

Supporting Actress in a Play: Stefannie Savoy as Helene Shaw in Who Am I This Time?

Ensemble: Guys and Dolls

Choreography: Molly Zaleski for Guys and Dolls

Direction: Rick Bodick for Guys and Dolls

 

To see the full list of winners for this ceremony, click onhttp://www.nationalyouththeatre.com/news/news_nya_awards2017_eastern_matinee.asp.

Recent graduate Leah Graham has a story on the first page of the Free Press today (above the fold, too)! 

She's doing an internship with the Free Press this summer and this is the first assignment she turned in to them. :) 

Here is a link to the web version of the story:

 

The following THS students will be receiving the Presidential Volunteer Service Award this year. They have almost 3000 hours of community service collectively!

Detroit News and Catch Outstanding Graduates. Leah Graham was honored in journalism and Ricky Young was honored in social studies

Divya Aggarwal and Priyanka Pulvender were one of five national finalists for the Genes in Space science competition.  Their idea was selected from over 375 proposals. They will be working with mentor scientists from MIT and Harvard and attending a conference to Washington, D.C. this summer to compete for the top prize which involves sending their experiment to the International Space Station.

 

Out of 601 semifinalists who competed nationally in the 2017 USA Biology Olympiad semifinal exam, Jason Zhang was recognized for scoring in the top 50 students.

 

Meghan Monaghan is a finalist in the Michigan Society for Medical Research Annual Essay Contest. Her essay on the eradication of Ebola was selected from amongst 400 submissions. She will find out in late June if she is the top recipient of this award which includes a cash prize.

The 2016-2017 school year has certainly been an eventful one for the Troy High Quizbowl team. These trivia-guzzling academics worked very hard this season and finished in the top rankings at almost all of the invitational and state competitions this year, including a brilliant first place finish at the 2017 Eastwood Invitational Tournament in Ohio. These accolades allowed the Troy High Quizbowl  A team, made up of Dhanush Bathala, Tuhin Chakraborty, Johanan Isaac, Rashika Rao, Jack White and Kevin Qing to advance to the NAQT High School National Championship in Atlanta, Georgia which will be held on May 26-28. Congratulations to our Troy Quizbowlers!  

Freddie Zhao has qualified for the Mathematical Olympiad Program (MOP).  This is the 4^th stage, starting at the AMC, then AIME, then USAMO (which was the 4 ½ hour 2-day test a few weeks ago).  Only about 20 or so students in the nation qualify for the MOP.  The program is a month long, very intense training at Carnegie Mellon University.

Divya Aggarwal and Priyanka Pulvender were one of five national finalists for the Genes in Space science competition.  Their idea was selected from over 375 proposals. They will be working with mentor scientists from MIT and Harvard and attending a conference to Washington, D.C. this summer to compete for the top prize which involves sending their experiment to the International Space Station.

 

Out of 601 semifinalists who competed nationally in the 2017 USA Biology Olympiad semifinal exam, Jason Zhang was recognized for scoring in the top 50 students.

 

Meghan Monaghan is a finalist in the Michigan Society for Medical Research Annual Essay Contest. Her essay on the eradication of Ebola was selected from amongst 400 submissions. She will find out in late June if she is the top recipient of this award which includes a cash prize.

A few weeks ago, Troy High's HOSA Club competed at the State Conference in Traverse City (April 27-28). A lot of our students were able to place at States and many qualified for HOSA Nationals in Orlando, Florida during June 21-24. It would be nice for these students to be recognized for their hard work and achievements on the school website. (See below for a list of students and their events and placements) Thanks, Jason Zhang 18 students qualified for Nationals (top 3) and 27 students were named State Finalists (top 8). 2nd Place in Biomedical Laboratory Science: Pratham Soni 2nd Place in Community Awareness: Esha Ghosalkar, Jane Kim, Yejin Kim, Claire Yang 6th Place in Community Awareness: Neil Garg, Kamal Kadali, Teja Pulavarthi, Vaibhav Srinivasan 7th Place in Epidemiology: James Li 3rd Place in Health Career Photography: Mirranda Kinaia 5th Place in Health Career Photography: Lauren Alberts 3rd Place in Healthy Lifestyle: Dhanush Bathala 4th Place in Job Seeking Skills: Shreya Subramanium 3rd Place in KT Behavioral Health: Claire Hao 7th Place in KT Behavioral Health: Abby Miya 1st Place in KT Human Growth and Development: Srijani Sengupta 4th Place in KT Human Growth and Development: Kaitlyn Hao 6th Place in KT Human Growth and Development: Aimee Zheng 2nd in KT Nutrition: Viji Jambunathan 1st in KT Pathophysiology: Kathy Gu 6th Place in KT Pharmacology: Zain Hameed 2nd Place in KT Transcultural Health Care: Daniel Zheng 1st Place in Medical Innovation (Original): Justin Fernando, Sara Huang, Peter Nam, Jason Zhang 6th Place in Medical Innovation (Advanced): Jason Fernando, Johanan Isaac, Nikhil Ramachandra, Arnav Ramu 3rd in Medical Math: Rohit Goru 6th Place in Parliamentary Procedure: Eric Choi, Vineet Kamat, Nilay Kulkarni, Howard Li, Vikas Sharma, Eric Zhang 8th Place in Parliamentary Procedure: Inwoo Cho, Hanna Jung, Kathy Lu, Rohini Verma, Serena Yee 2nd Place in Physical Therapy: Elena Renke 6th Place in Speaking: Adithya Sanjay

The boys and girls track teams performed very well at the OAA White Championship meet last night. The girls finished at 5-0 for the season and won the meet, claiming back-to-back League titles. The boys finished 5-0 but were runners-up at the meet, so they are League Co-Champs with Avondale. This is the first time since 1996 that the boys have won their league, and both boys and girls were League Champs that year too. The teams now look ahead to the County, Regional, and State Championship meets in the weeks to come. Congrats to both boys and girls!

Freddie Zhao has qualified for the Mathematical Olympiad Program (MOP).  This is the 4^th stage, starting at the AMC, then AIME, then USAMO (which was the 4 ½ hour 2-day test a few weeks ago).  Only about 20 or so students in the nation qualify for the MOP.  The program is a month long, very intense training at Carnegie Mellon University.

Harikrishnan Sanil, Grade-9, competed in The National Geography Olympiad, International Geography Bee and the National History Bee Championships (national level) for the High School and Middle School students this past weekend in Washington-DC.

 

Hari, having qualified in state level earlier, represented the state of Michigan and did very well and has qualified to proceed to the international level. Hari will be one of the contestants representing the United States in the International Geography Bee World Meet to be held in Berlin, Germany. 

Congratulations to Jessica Hart who made the Michigan State University Elite Dance Team!

Congratulations to Mark on winning first place in the under 1100 and 2^nd place in the under 1300 in table tennis at the championship in Saginaw, Michigan!!

After competing at the Michigan State Championship in Saginaw last Thur/Fri/Sat, we learned yesterday that our robotics team will be advancing to the World Championship in St. Louis next Tue (4/25) at 2:30p and returning to Troy on Sun, 4/30, at approximately 7pm.

Alex Miros (2012 graduate) just finished his first Boston Marathon in a time of 3:27:12. He had qualified at the Charlevoix Marathon last June with a 2:58:59!

This fall several students entered the national Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Three students  won several awards and were among the artists and writers in grades 7-12 who submitted approximately 10,000 entries to the 2017 competition. Claire Hao won two silver keys and Kelley Liu won three gold keys and one silver key and Kaitlyn Hao won a silver key.

I thought you might want to know a success story from 2 students I recommended for the Bank of America Student leader program. Both Quinn Favret and Hana Barre were 2 of the 5 students selected from Michigan! This program has a 2.5% acceptance rate (~9000 students apply nationally, ~ 220 selected. They will have an internship at Focus Hope Detroit (non-profit) for 7 weeks this summer. They also received an all-expense paid week trip to DC.

The combined Troy High and Athens High School choirs recently had the privilege of performing at the Detroit Music Hall, Center for the Performing Arts, on March 24, with world-renowned pianist, composer, singer, and entertainer, 15-year-old Ethan Bortnick.

“I was contacted by the parent of a former choir student…who shared with me that Ethan was looking for a local Choir to perform with him for his Detroit concert date,” said Director of Troy Choirs Adrienne Covian.  Ethan is a gifted musician who has been playing piano since he was 4 and travels all around the world sharing his music.  He believes strongly in the power of music and that with and through music anything is possible. Ethan has worked with some legendary performers like Elton John, Celine Dion, David Foster, and more.

“I presented the idea to my students, and they enthusiastically agreed,” continued Covian, “…and so we prepared several selections (‘We Are The World’ and ‘Lean On Me,’) that we felt were inspirational.”

 “It was a magical evening full of hope and music,” said Troy Concert Choir member Jillian Bucaro, ’17, “and performing on that stage is an experience I will never forget.”

The combined Troy and Athens Choirs consist of 3 ensembles, numbering 89 students.

 For more information, please visit http://troyhighchoirs.weebly.com/. 

Hello Troy High,

Here is some great news!!! Coach Simon Bato’s  2016-17 varsity girls’ basketball team was recently named to the Team Academic All-State list!  Their 3.871 team GPA is third among Class A schools in Michigan (see the link below for the full list).  

 

 

Academic All State Link: http://www.bcam.org:40400/sites/default/files/17GirlsTeamAcademic.pdf

On behalf of the Oakland County and Oakland Schools, I am very pleased to inform you that your school’s Michigan Green Schools Program application has been accepted.   

 

A Review Panel has thoroughly examined and evaluated your application for adherence to PA 301 (2010) as well as to the Guidelines set forth by the Southeast Michigan Green Schools collaborative group which consists of Macomb, Oakland and Wayne County coordinators. 

 

After a thorough review and evaluation, your school has earned the designation of  EMERALD for the 2016-17 program year. 

 

The extra hours and effort you have made to participate in this important endeavor is appreciated. We wish to congratulate and recognize your school for its outstanding leadership in environmental stewardship efforts and for spearheading activities which involve the students, staff, parents, volunteers and community. 

Our robotics club competed in Woodhaven this past weekend and ranked 3rd among the 40 teams competing. Our team also was awarded the highest honor with the District Chairman's Award which qualifies our team to compete at the Michigan State Championship in April (4/12 through 4/15 at Saginaw Valley State University). The Chairman's Award is the most prestigious award as it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,https://www.firstinspires.org ). It is presented to the team judged to have the most significant impact of its partnerships among its participants and community over a sustained period. 

 

Ahead of the Michigan State Championship, we are hosting our Troy District Robotics Competition at Athens HS this Friday, 3/31, and Saturday, 4/1. Admission is free, and everyone is welcome to come and cheer us on.

 

Please include the above in announcement to students and encourage them to see us compete at AHS this Fri/Sat.

 

Below are additional information on our Chairman's Award you may find amazing:

One of your students, Jenny Zhi, was selected as a 2017 NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Award Recipient in your region!   She was selected out of a record number of applications (3500+ nationally) and stood out among her peers as a young women with technical skills and/or potential. This is a huge honor and I hope you are as proud and as inspired as we are!

Jae Woo Kim

Seongjin Park

Shania Yap

Joong Hyun Lee

Nathan Drasovean

Brian Oh

 

Aadharsh Acharya, 

Yong Jin Nam

Shruthi Sunikumar

Nathan Worrel

 

Neelesh Bollu

Sebin Choi

Yonghan Park

Sang Yoon Moon

 

Yejin Kim

Vaibhav Srinivasan

Megan Worrel

 

Raagini Chandra

Jaehee Lee

Rashika Rao

 

Rima Shkoukani

Katherine Fraus

Yinghua Li

Semi Park

Jieun Lee

Biology Competitions Club has had a lot of success lately having had students win three competitions in just the last couple of weeks. Richard Yang won the top honor "grand award winner" at the Science and Engineering Fair of Metro Detroit and Freddie Zhao, Spencer Liu, and Chittesh Thavamani won 2nd place as a team award. Richard will now represent Michigan and compete at Intel's Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles in May. Richard Yang also won the 1st place award at the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium for his science research and Ashta Dalal took home 4th place. Richard will be traveling to San Diego in April to compete at the national level of this competition, while Ashta will be going as well to display her research poster. Thirteen students in Biology Competitions Club and/or AP Biology scored in the top 10% in the USA Biology Olympiad amongst the ~10,000 students who take this exam annually. Those students include: Dhanush Bathala, Sahil Dogra, Kathleen Gu, Claire Hao,Joonghyun Lee, James Li, Michael Lin, Robert Mu, Adithya Sanjay, Chittesh Thavamani, Richard Yang, Daniel Zheng, and Jason Zhang. They just competed at the next round as semifinalists and are awaiting the results to find out if they are finalists.

EXCITING NEWS! Danielle Nicholson won two awards at the 2017 Michigan Student Film Festiva!

 Troy High Short Story Writing Contest winners:

  

First Place: Life is Beautiful by Madeline Trumbauer

Second Place: Danger in Every Language by Divya Aggarwal

Third Place: from “The Eye Place” by Kelly Liu

Honorable Mention: Details, Details by Angela Dong

Honorable Mention: Life of a Virus by Prasanth Peddireddy

Honorable Mention: The Masked Hero by Joe Wirthlin

The following 13 students scored in the top 10% nationally on the USA Biology Olympiad Exam out of ~10,000 students. 

 

This past weekend was extremely successful for THS Model UN! MSU is the most challenging conference in our state with about 40 high schools from Michigan and Illinois. We had many students win individual awards but we also took home 1 of only 4 school awards.  If you have any MUN students, or one of these students, please congratulate them on achieving an award within their council:

 

Best Delegate (highest award)

Vikas Sharma

 

Outstanding Delegate (think second place)

Muyang Wang

William Zhang

Zahra Ahmed

Noihrita Masud

 

Honorable Mention

Nick Myhrer

Kaitlyn Hao

 

Verbal Commendations

Afriti Chinoy

 

Book Award

Jacob Overberg

Jason Fan

Akhil Tatineni

 

Outstanding Large Delegation (one of the top awards)

Leah Graham (senior), just received word that she has been named Michigan’s Journalist of the Year by the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association as well as the Journalism Education Association!

 

Her portfolio was unanimously chosen as the state winner among a pool of top applicants in all categories of scholastic journalism in the state. She will now move on to compete against the other 49 state winners for the national Journalist of the Year award.

 

Wow, what an amazing weekend.  The Troy/Avondale Varsity gymnastics team placed 3rd at the Regional meet making them one of the top 3 teams to move on to State Team Competition.  We also had several girls qualify for individual competition at the State Level.    We are very proud of the girls, they have worked very hard to be where they are.  Most of the teams that they competed with had anywhere from 12 to 14 girls that qualified for regionals and anyone of them could contribute to the team score.   Our team had 5-7 of the same girls competing on each event, and came to the meet prepared and ready to compete.  They did an amazing job working together and supporting each other.  Below are the final results:

 

 

Team Score:  138.725

 

Division 1:

            Vault—Lana Meaders—3rd

                        Noelle Kaminski—6th

                       

            Bars—Lana Meaders—2nd

                           Madison Darish—5th

 

            Beam—Lana Meaders—Regional Champion

                             Noelle Kaminski—5th

                             Madison Darish—7th

 

            Floor—Madison Darish—4th

                            Noelle Kaminski—6th

 

            All Around— Lana Meaders—4th

                                         Madison Darish—5th

 Division 2:

           Beam—Adelyn Schmidt—7th

Congratulations to Esha Ghosalkar. Esha was among the top 10 percent of all applicants from Michigan for the Prudential Spirit of Community Award.

Congratulations to the THS Chess Team who had two teams place in the Michigan High School Chess Tournament over the weekend.

 

A Team 2nd Reserve: SUKRUTANAND  NADIGOTTI, BHASKAR  KAPASIYA, , ALLEN DIAO, MAX HUANG

 

B team 3^rd Reserve:  CHITTESH THAVAMANI, JOHANON ISAAC, ANGEL ANGUIANO, JAMES GE

Tuhin Chakraborty  was accepted into the Citizen University Youth Collaboratory for 2017. Citizen University is a Seattle based organization that promotes responsible civic engagement and problem solving. Tuhin was one of 25 students nationwide selected and will get to attend the Citizen University conference in Seattle this March, along with conferences in Detroit this summer and Chicago in the Fall.

Congratulations to THS students achieving ASE (Automotive Service Excellence) Student Certifications! The students are Andrew Davis, senior (Auto Suspension & Steering, and Brakes), Samuel Dawidowicz, junior (Auto Suspension & Steering, and Brakes), John Kolar, senior (Auto Brakes), Brendan Heath, senior (Auto Brakes), Vamsi Puppala, sophomore (Auto Suspension & Steering, and Brakes), Ross Talbert, senior (Auto Suspension & Steering, and Brakes), and Matt Williams, senior (Auto Brakes).

Troy High School is very proud of students who achieved a 36 composite score on the ACT. Congratulations to Liam Clancy, junior, David Nie, senior, and Ji-Yoon (Kaylee) Won, junior, on their perfect ACT scores!

 

 

A team of THS Biology Competitions Club (BCC) students won “Best in State” for the Verizon Innovative App Contest. Please see the link to the competition, https://appchallenge.tsaweb.org/. Congratulations to BCC members Sahil Dogra, Kathleen Gu, Claire Hao, Kaitlyn Hao, Richard Yang, Aimee Zheng andDaniel Zheng! They will now compete for Best in Region!

A team of Troy High students won "Best in State" for the Verizon Innovative App Challenge and are now eligible to win the "Fan Favorite Award" which includes $15,000 and a trip to Orlando. Please help by texting the word BACTERIA to the number 22333 once a day from 1/17 to 2/14. Thanks for your support!

Biology Competitions Club students won “Best in State” for the Verizon Innovative App Contest. This is the link to the competition: https://appchallenge.tsaweb.org/ Here are the list of Biology Competitions Club Members who won:

Good News – Troy High School is very proud of students who achieved a 36 composite score on the ACT. Congratulations to Claire Hao, junior, and Spencer Liu, junior on their perfect ACT scores!

Congratulations to Dhanush Bathala, Junior, for his perfect score of 36 on the ACT. 

This past weekend our Model UN students competed with many schools from across Michigan, Ohio, and Canada. Our students performed very well and we were one the highest ranked schools. If you have any of these students please congratulate them on achieving an award within their council:

 

Vikas Sharma

Nikhil Ramachandra

Anna Nichols

William Zhang

Ethan Lazrado

Nicholas Myhrer

Afriti Chinoy

Michael Lin

Muyang Wang

Approximately 5000 students from around the state took Part 1 of the MMPC (Michigan Math Prize Competition).  Only 7 students received a perfect score on part 1.  We have 3 of those 7 students in our school…Freddie Zhao, Spencer Liu & Chittesh Thavamani.  

Our Stories, Our Voices: Growing Up Asian American is a student produced documentary. View the promo here.

 

The Siemens Math and Science Research Competition released the semifinalists list today.  16 THS students are Siemens Semi-Finalists.  We'll find out soon if any go on to be finalists.

 

Ian Thompson, junior, recently achieved the status of Eagle Scout. Eagle Scout is the highest achievement or rank attainable in the Boy Scouting program of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA).

Michael Kolakowski is a second place recipient of the 2016 National Spanish Senior Scholarship. In March, Michael earned a gold medal on the National Spanish Exam, Level 5. This achievement made him eligible to continue competing at the national level. Michael submitted a video clip in Spanish in which he discussed his future plans and a persuasive essay in Spanish. His work was reviewed by a committee from the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.  Currently, Michael is a freshman at the University of Michigan.

Lydia Tan received a national gold medal from Scholastic Art and Writing, her work was selected from 320,000 pieces of art and writing submissions. Her artwork was chosen as one of 65 to be exhibited in the main lobby of the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, DC.

TROY THEATRE ENSEMBLE HONORED FOR SHREK THE MUSICAL

The results of the 11th Annual National Youth Arts Awards for the 2015-2016 season have been released, and Troy High School earned 3 awards and 4 additional nominations!

Awards:
Lead Actor in a Musical: Tyler Bouque as Shrek in Shrek the Musical
Supporting Actor in a Musical: Eric Cheng as Donkey in Shrek the Musical
Featured Actress in a Musical: Emily Lourim as Gingy in Shrek the Musical

Nominations:
Lead Actress in a Musical: Jordan Held as Fiona in Shrek the Musical
Supporting Actor in a Musical: Brian Ball as Farquaad in Shrek the Musical
Set Design: Shrek the Musical
Direction: Rick Bodick for Shrek the Musical

To see the full list of winners for this ceremony, click on http://www.nationalyouththeatre.com/news/news_nya_awards2016_eastern_matinee.asp.


There will be an awards ceremony held at the Riverdale YM-YWHA in Bronx, New York at 2:00 p.m. (registration beginning at 1:15 p.m.) on Sunday, August 21. Award winners, including all cast members of Ensemble and Production awards, will be invited up to the stage for the presentation of the award. Nomination certificates will be available at the registration table for all individual nominees or given to the director for distribution.

Trena Datta, junior,  earned a 36 on the ACT!

The Robotics team competed in an off-season event last Friday and Saturday in Taylor and came in 2nd place among 23 teams

Studies show that children who read well do better in all aspects of school and beyond.  Reading skills correspond directly to one's ability to be an informed citizen, communicate effectively, earn a higher salary, succeed in one's chosen career, and achieve personal fulfillment.

The question most of us have is how do we get children to read more.  This fall my classes decided to do a Book Challenge.  Each student set a goal to try to read an average of four fun paperback books by the end of the semester.  We used several sources to find books:  goodreads.com, the DestinyQuest app, Mrs. Isaac and the Media Center, friends, family, other students, web sites like Amazon.com, etc.  We listened to some samples of audio books in class.  Students were given class time to read and encouraged to carry a book with them at all times.  They could read a paper book or an electronic book.  If they started a book and didn’t like it, then stop and find another one.  The goal was to give students the opportunity to find a book they enjoyed reading and give them time to read. 

At the end of the semester students turned in the number of pages they had read.  Our classes collectively read over 53,000 pages.  Prizes were Starbucks tumblers and glasses and would be given to the student from each class who read the most.  The winners:

Adie Harig 4,199

Victoria Bennett 2,636

Kayla Clowney 1,765

Marianna Renke 1,500

The following students earned the Presidential Volunteer Service Award for the 2015-2016 school year.

 

Gold Award:

 

Silver Award:

 

Bronze Award:

Divya Aggarwal, a Smith and THS student, is a finalist in the Scripps National Spelling Bee!  She has been in Washington D.C. all week competing and yesterday was named a top 50 finalist.

Walsh College Launchpad recently held their “Make It Better” Entrepreneurship Competition, which is open to all high school students in Michigan.

 

Out of the 200 statewide entries they received, 9 of those were from our own Troy High Entrepreneurship Club, and 3 out of those 9 students placed in the competition.

 

Please join me in congratulating the following students:

 

  

Representatives from Walsh College joined us yesterday in our meeting and they couldn’t stop raving about what impressive business ideas were coming out of Troy High.

Coming in 17th out of 1444 teams in the regional high school rankings for The Stock Market Game’s Spring session:

 

Katie Bogdanovich

Will Hern

AuJenee Hirsch

Joshua Desmon achieved the rank of Eagle Scout.

Senior Christopher Chen is a winner in the area of science for the Detroit News Catch Scholarship.

Science Olympiad State Tournament

Saturday, April 30^th

            Each school is represented by fifteen students.  Those 15 students compete in groups of two or three to cover twenty-three individual events that relate to a wide variety of science-related topics.  Troy High finished in second place (out of 48 teams from around the state) in 2002, 2013, and now 2016. The 2016 results are the best ever, with 14 of 15 team members winning medals and a total of 5 first place, 6 second place, 2 third place, 1 fourth place, 1 fifth place, and 2 sixth place finishes.

Troy High team came 1st in Destination Imagination Michigan State competition held at CMU over the week end. The will compete now at DI Globals. Team members are

 

1) Vedika Aigalikar

2) Raagini Chandra

3) Tina Tripathi

4) Madalasa Chaudhari

5) Pranathi Locula

 

Congratulations to them for winning the competition. 

Yesterday, the newspaper and yearbook programs represented THS very well at the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association’s Spring Awards Conference.

 

Yearbook students brought home 36 individual awards in writing, design, photography, and theme categories for last year’s  yearbook. Newspaper students brought home 26 individual awards for writing, design, and photography. Each publication earned a gold medal with distinction.

 

In addition, senior Erin Mitchell was named to the 2016 MIPA Student Journalist Staff (essentially the All-State team for journalists) for her work on yearbook.

 

If you want to congratulate students, I’m pasting a list of names and awards. Many are graduated seniors who worked on last year’s yearbook.

 

 

Jessica Butler, Erin Mitchell & Tiffany Nogoy       First Place, Sports Feature Writing

 

Caroline Schlimgen & Somya Amin                First Place, Student Life Spread

 

Ali Bultynck          First Place, Portrait/Personality Photo

 

Erin Mitchell          First Place, Individual Advertisement: Business Ad

 

Ali Bultynck           First Place, School Spirit Photo

 

Somya Amin         First Place, Academic Photo

 

Staff        First Place, Cover

 

Staff       First Place, Index

 

Staff       First Place, Opening and Closing

 

Erin Mitchell   Second Place, Advertisement: Proud Parent Ad

 

Addison Bouzide & Isabelle Taylor       Second Place, Sports Feature Writing

 

Kasey Garvelink, Erin Mitchell & Courteney Roberts          Second Place, Caption Writing

 

Staff      Second Place, Endsheets

 

Staff      Second Place, Theme Development

 

Staff     Second Place, Division Page

 

Somya Amin & Gwyneth Finney     Second Place, Organization Spread

 

Erin Mitchell     Third Place, Advertising Spread

 

Patricia Durell & Celine Taylor      Third Place, Sports Reporting

 

Ali Bultynck      Third Place, School Spirit Photo

 

Jessica Butler & Isabelle Taylor       Third Place, Academic Spread

 

Jessica Butler          Third Place, Organizations Writing

 

Kasey Garvelink              Third Place, Academic Photo

 

Somya Amin, Erin Mitchell & Courteney Roberts               Third Place, Feature Presentation

 

Caroline Schlimgen & Somya Amin           Honorable Mention, Feature Writing - Student Life

 

Celine Taylor & Amy Trenh        Honorable Mention, Academic Spread

 

Cara Burns & Megan Falk   Honorable Mention, Personality Profile

 

Adjoa Aniapam & Emily Fritz       Honorable Mention, Organizations Writing

 

Somya Amin, Erin Mitchell & Courteney Roberts      Honorable Mention, Sidebar Coverage

 

Kasey Garvelink & Courteney Roberts      Honorable Mention, Student Life Spread

 

Jessica Barnowski      Honorable Mention, Portrait/Personality Photo

 

Amy Trenh          Honorable Mention, Academic Writing

 

Ali Bultynck           Honorable Mention, Sports Feature Photo

 

Julia Best              Honorable Mention, Club/Performance Photo

 

Kasey Garvelink      Honorable Mention, Sports Feature Photo

 

Julia Best, Melissa Smith, Celine Taylor & Isabelle Taylor             Honorable Mention, Feature Presentation

 

Julia Best & Kasey Garvelink          Honorable Mention, Organization Spread

 

 Chariot Newspaper Award Winners

 

Leah Graham   First Place, Review

 

Leah Graham         First Place, Sports Feature Photo

 

Bhavya Sukhavasi      First Place, Sports Feature Photo

 

Jenny Boudon     First Place, Comic Strip

 

Soumeeka Koneru         Second Place, Front Page/Newsmagazine Style

 

Leah Graham         Second Place, Online News Brief

 

Jenny Boudon         Second Place, Editorial Cartoon

 

Bianca Bucholtz      Third Place, Sports Feature Photo

 

AuJenee Hirsch        Third Place, Personal Narrative

 

AuJenee Hirsch        Third Place, Online Follow-Up News Coverage

 

Soumeeka Koneru     Honorable Mention, Personality Profile

 

Snigdha Suvarna       Honorable Mention, News Analysis

 

Staff   Honorable Mention, Editorial

 

Emily Hamilton    Honorable Mention, Information Graphic

 

Leah Graham         Honorable Mention, In-Depth Feature

 

Soumeeka Koneru        Honorable Mention, News Story

 

Sarah Semon         Honorable Mention, Informative Feature

 

Jarrod Fortner            Honorable Mention, Diversity Coverage

 

AuJenee Hirsch           Honorable Mention, News/Feature Photo

 

Leah Graham          Honorable Mention, News/Feature Photo

 

Staff        Honorable Mention, Editorial

 

Deepthi Devireddy        Honorable Mention, Human Interest Feature

 

Hailey Davison, Adam Sliwinski, Leah Graham & AuJenee Hirsch         Honorable Mention, Story Package

 

Bhavya Sukhavasi & Soumeeka Koneru       Honorable Mention, Front Page/Newsmagazine Style

 

Staff         Honorable Mention, Feature Page/Spread

 

Jenny Boudon       Honorable Mention, Editorial Cartoon

Troy High team came 1st in Destination Imagination Michigan State competition held at CMU over the week end. The will compete now at DI Globals. Team members are

 

1) Vedika Aigalikar

2) Raagini Chandra

3) Tina Tripathi

4) Madalasa Chaudhari

5) Pranathi Locula

 

Congratulations to them for winning the competition. 

On behalf of the Troy Garden Club, I am very happy to announce that six Troy High School students have won awards in the Troy Garden Club's 2016 Garden Walk Art Competition, our 8th annual.

 

The students are:

 

 

Puja Trivedi - 3rd prize, high school 

 

 

 

 

 

Anthony, Puja, Lisa, Jenny, Anna and Caroline are among two dozen Troy School District students who will receive art competition awards on Thursday, May 5 at our annual art awards ceremony from 7:00 - 8:00 pm in the Troy Historic Village's church building. 

Here are the Future Problem Solvers results from this weekend. The kids did a wonderful job, and represented THS in such a positive manner. Two teams and one individual from the club received invites to the FPS International Competition in June...WAY TO GO!!

 

Here are the FPS results:

 

M8--Vrushali Ambardekar, Priyal Bajaj, Tiffany Guo, Lilian Xiao

1st Place Team--Middle Division, with an invitation to Internationals

3rd Place Presentation of Action Plan

 

Renuka Murthi

1st place Individual--Middle Division, with an invitation to Internationals

1st place Scenario Writing--Middle Division

 

S17--Angela Chen, Ingrid Fan, Lucy Li, Ashley Zhang

3rd Place Team--Senior Division

3rd Place Presentation of Action Plan

 

S8--Christopher Chen, Jenny Shang, Michael Wong, Alex Zhang

2nd Place Team--Senior Division, with an invitation to Internationals

 

Congratulations to all of our competitors in this year's state bowl. You've represented our school well, and made Troy High proud!

Listed below are recent wins of students in Biology Competitions Club and/or AP Biology. 

 

Science and Engineering Fair of Metro Detroit (SEFMD):

 

Amy Li  -  Grand Award Winner  

Amy Li who is a grand award winner will now go to Phoenix, Arizona to compete at Intel ISEF:

Asavari Rajpurkar (with 2 teammates from other schools) -  First Place 

David Wu  -  First Place  

Emily Wang  - Second Place 

Jeff Guan (with 2 teammates: Evan Jiang and William Zhang) - Third Place  

Justin Xu  - Third Place  

Richard Yang  - Fourth Place   He was also awarded the Stockholm Junior Water Prize Regional Award for his research as SEFMD by one of the judges.

Raul Dutta  - Fourth Place  

 

 

Richard Yang  won 2^nd place, received a $1,500 college scholarship, and will now go compete at the national level in Dayton, Ohio

 

 

The following students are semifinalists (scored in the top 10% in the nation) for USABO:

David Wu  

Yiyang Shen  

Ajith Dupati  

Kathleen Gu  

Varun Sridhar  

Ho Chul (Brandon) Jung, a senior in Chinese 4, won the 2nd place in the 11th Chinese Bridge Speech Contest for U. S. High School Students on March 19 at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The contest is for non-Chinese heritage students only.  Brandon made a 4-minute Chinese speech and sang a Chinese song, Chrysanthemum Terrace, along with his cello playing.

PLEASE EXTEND YOUR CONGRATULATIONS TO JENNY ZHI, SHE IS A NATIONAL SCHOLASTIC ART AND WRITING AWARDS WINNER WITH A SILVER MEDAL!

Michael Best,  Ben Balas, and Tyler Braidwood, Troy High Seniors,  have all accomplished and obtained the rank of Eagle Scout.

At the MHSAA Swimming and Diving State Championships, Troy High finished 18^th in the State scoring 31 points.  Max Chen finished 3^rd in the state in the 100-Yard Breast and 4^th in the 200-Yard, Individual Medley.   

 

At the MHSAA Gymnastics State Championships Saturday, Noelle Kaminski earned 27th on vault, 21st on bars, 25th on beam, 36th on floor, and 23 in the state for all-around.  Madison Darish was 18th on bars, 20th on beam, 22nd on floor, and Erin Long also competed on floor.  Other awards include Noelle Kaminski won a Sportsmanship Award where she won a medal from the state, Madison Darish and Noelle Kaminski won All-State Scholar Athlete awards for having higher than a 3.5 and making it to state, and all three gymnasts made the All-Regional Team.

The Troy United Synchronized Swimming Team won the state championship -- again!

Megan Durell and Emily Lourim have been selected as recipients of The Arc of Oakland County's 2016 Dove Award.

Greetings Writers,  

First of all, I want to thank everyone who entered the Troy High Short Story contest this year--we had a number of fantastic submissions, and picking a winner was extraordinarily difficult.

Our winners are: 

First Place: Ashely Zhang—Behind the Ovation

Second Place: Joe Wirthlin—Story Jumper

Third Place: Zain Hameed—Copy of Perceptive Me

Congratulations to the winners and all the entrants. It was an honor to read your creative, unique writings. 

Troy High Robotics Team takes first in the state!

Troy High School students participating the Viennese Straussball

 

Once again Troy High School students participated in the Viennese Straussball and couldn’t get enough of it. The weeks of practice finally paid back, it was a picture perfect moment in their lives. Some students attended for the second time, for some it was the first time in this glamorous event. Not to many people know the history of the Straussball in our area but it is certainly worth to read about it:

 

The Austrian Society of Detroit’s Strauss Ball allows for a glimpse into the celebration of the Viennese ballroom culture. Each year more than 450 balls take place in city of waltzes during the carnival season in January and February. This year we enjoyed having several Troy students participate in this event. 

 

The waltz is one of the core elements of any Viennese ball and started as a turning dance of couples. It appeared to represent some of the new values of the era such as the principles of freedom, character, passion, and expressiveness.  During the 18th century, the Viennese waltz’s popularity grew quickly in Vienna, the surrounding areas and among the common people. However, especially in the beginning it was considered vulgar by the Viennese nobility, which would not accept the improper intimate contact between dancers. This attitude changed over time through established and well-known musicians such as Franz Schubert and Johann Strauss I. 

 

Also Emperor Joseph II, 1741-1790 played a role in the change.  He had more respect for the common man and less respect for nobility than the average royal.  The emperor decided that the ballrooms in the Hofburg palace should not be reserved just for nobility alone.  In 1773 he made the ballrooms available for public balls for the common man. This started the tradition of public balls in Vienna, and introduced the upper class to that dance of the commoner, The Waltz!

 

Johann Strauss is often referred to as Johann Strauss II and was born on October 25, 1825, in Vienna, Austria.  His father, Johann Strauss the Elder, was a self-taught musician who established a musical empire in Vienna, writing waltzes, galops, polkas and publishing more than 250 works. Johann the Younger went on to write more than 500 musical compositions, 150 of which were waltzes, and he surpassed his father's popularity. Strauss will forever be known as “The Waltz King”.

 

Here is a brief history on the Austrian Society of Detroit’s Viennese Strauss Balls:

The first Viennese Strauss Ball took place in Detroit in 1937.  For the first two years, the event was named Viennese Evening or “Wiener Abend”.  After several moves to larger venues, the Viennese Strauss Ball finally found its home at the Riverview Ball Room of Cobo Center. Over the years it continued to develop its glamor and splendor into the elegant ball of today, very reminiscent of the great balls of Vienna.  Currently the ball takes place the last Saturday of January or the first Saturday of February at the Palazzo Grande in Shelby Township. 

 

Each ball every year begins with a cocktail hour and dinner.  The festivities start with an opening ceremony that includes welcome and introductions, followed by a short performance by the junior debutantes and escorts (children).  The program continues with the magical highlights of the evening starting with the presentation of the debutantes and their escorts.  Immediately continues with the Grand March in intricate formation, followed by a Polonaise and then concluded with dancing the Viennese Waltz.  The ladies are in beautiful, flowing, white ball gowns and the men in black tuxes with tails, white gloves and bowties.  Open dance for all follows until midnight with the Macomb Symphony - Strauss Orchestra and the Eric Neubauer Ensemble both filling the hall with live music and the ambiance of being in one of Vienna’s palaces.

 

This gala is a formal ceremony that serves as an introduction of the debutantes into society.  Each year all the dancers are invited back to perform the next year and are called “The Court of Honor”.  Almost all participants come back and in the process builds life-lasting friendships. Many school districts accept the dance practice sessions as community service hours or as extra credit. Please consider being part of this celebration of Austrian culture and tradition at next year’s Viennese Strauss Ball. 

The National German Exam is administered each year to nearly 22,000 students in the second, third and fourth level of German. The exam provides individual diagnostic feedback, rewards students through an extensive prize program, and creates a sense of accomplishment. Exam results provide a means of comparing students in all regions of the country, as well as programmatic data provided to help inform curricular decisions. Exam results are among the criteria used in selecting the recipients of chapter awards and the national AATG/PAD Study trip awards, a four-week study trip program in Germany.

Troy High students participate every year in this program. Following are this years results of the exam for German 2, 3 and 4.  

German 1 will take the National Exam the end of April 2016.

 

This past weekend, the Troy High Chess Team, comprised of Bhaskar Kapasiya, Peter Ko, Johanan Isaac, Brian Lee, and Lifan Zeng, won the reserve (U1000) division of the Michigan High School Team Chess Championship, the state team championship.  The tournament was held at Oakland University.  There were four rounds, and each round had two high school teams of four players competing against each other on four separate boards.  In Troy High's case, we had five players, so each round someone sat out.  In the end, Troy High scored 3 match wins and 1 draw and won the tournament.  Also congrats to Peter and Lifan for winning individual bronze medals and Lifan for winning all his games.

Please join me in congratulating a few of our entrepreneurial-minded Troy High students.

 

Arnav Ramu and Vaibhav Srinivasan presented their business plan this past Friday at the Sesi Midwestern Entrepreneurship Competition at Eastern Michigan University.  They ended up placing 2^nd in this competition, winning a prize of $750!

 

Abhinav Thirupathi also received an honorable mention at Sesi for his business plan.

 

Jaehee Lee, Katherine Diederich, Shivani Kolluru and Palkin Rampal attended University of Michigan’s MPowered/Startup High School Entrepreneurship Field Day on Saturday, where they placed 3^rd in the “elevator pitch” competition.

 

If you happen to have any of these students in class, please give them a pat on the back.

 

Go Colts!

Good morning! I wanted to update you on the meet results from Saturday's big gymnastics invitational at Lakeland/Milford. Our team came in 11th place out of 18 teams! Our team received the qualifying score for regionals and we also had the following multiple gymnasts receive their regional qualifying scores:

 

Vault:

 

Bars

 

Beam

 

Floor

 

Other gymnasts that competed but did not receive their regional qualifying scores:

Whitney Reef

Hannah Russell

Congratulate Catherine Noonan on this honor, and please drop by the show at CCS to see all of the amazing art our Visual Arts students have created! All winners will be listed in the Troy Times soon!

 

Exhibit:

COLLEGE FOR CREATIVE STUDIES

WALTER B. FORD II Building, ford campus

The show runs from 2/8/2016-3/4/2016 9-5 pm. M-F

12pm-5pm Saturday and Sunday

Boy's Swimming won

the Lake Orion Relay meet

Winning 7 out of 12 events 2 seconds 2 thirds

Only one relay we did not medal in.

 

David Nie was named outstanding swimmer of the meet.

In early November, Joe Moceri had all of his students participate in the Bebras Challenge which is a national computing contest to see if students were proficient in computational thinking.  They divide the contest into groups based on age.  His students fell into two groups, junior division (age 14-16) and senior division (16-18).  Of his 121 students who participated (including my College Algebra students), 18 were in junior division and 103 were in the senior division.

 

In the junior division, one of THS students, Nathan Drasovean, had the highest score in the state with 172 out of 180 possible points (not sure if he was alone or tied with others).  In the senior division, THS senior Richard Jevarjian, was one of many state and nationally with a perfect score.  Statistically we were above the state and national average in both age groups.

 

Junior Division    average        max

THS                        108.333        172

Michigan               100.429        172

USA                           84.017        180

 

Senior Division    average        max

THS                        109.970        180

Michigan               108.808        180

USA                           94.810        180

Troy High has the boys singles Oakland County Tournament champion!   Carter Scillion with a 729 series. Games 216-237-276.  276 was the highest game of the tournament as well
Daniel Ryan finished 6th with a 661 series earning a medal as well.

THS Sophomore Esha Ghosalkar lead an event that raised $2794 for Thaw. 

32 members of the THS Model UN club competed in a conference in Lansing this weekend with over 600 students from across the Midwest and Canada.  7 of our students earned awards, showing their ability to not only research and understand international policy, but also to speak persuasively and collaborate with others to write and pass resolutions.

 

Please congratulate the following students:

 

Anshita Khare—Highest Honor

Anna Nichols—Highest Honor

Jason Fan—Highest Honor

KM Rahman—Highest Honor

Jacob Overberg—Highest Honor

Michael Lin—Highest Honor

Vikas Sharma—Highest Honor

Good morning! Troy High cleaned up last week in the national Write-off competitions in Orlando last week. Only three schools in Michigan had winners in these competitions. Troy High had SIX students place! This is a huge accomplishment as they were competing against over 2,000 of the nation's best and brightest student journalists. 

 

If you know and see the following students, please let them know that THS is proud!

9 THS students just found out they are Semifinalists for the Siemens Competition in Math, Science, and technology for their research.  

 

Spencer Liu won the National Academy of Future Scientists and Technologists Award of Excellence… and he’s only a sophomore! 

Troy High Robotics Team competed at Kettering University in an off-season event, and ranked No. 1 out of 46 teams after qualification rounds. It's been awhile since our team was in that position so everyone was very excited. During the playoff rounds, we advanced all the way to the finals, but ended up placing 2nd place behind the powerhouse winning alliance of teams from Clarkston (#27 Team RUSH) and Auburn Hills (#33 Killer Bees). 

Troy High Senior, Jennie Yang, donates 1,151 books to Detroit Public Schools.

Lead Actor in a Musical: Roshan Pathre as Emile DeBecque in South Pacific

Lead Actress in a Musical: Meg Brokenshire as Ensign Nellie Forbush in South Pacific

Ensemble: South Pacific

Direction: Rick Bodick for South Pacific

 

Outstanding Production: South Pacific

Lead Actor in a Play: Roshan Pathre as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet

Lead Actress in a Play: Lauren Valice as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet

Supporting Actor in a Musical: Eric Cheng as Luther Billis in South Pacific

Supporting Actor in a Musical: Quinn Moran as Lt. Joseph Cable in South Pacific

Supporting Actress in a Musical: Raagini Chandra as Bloody Mary in South Pacific

Supporting Actress in a Play: Meg Brokenshire as Nurse in Romeo and Juliet