Courtesy of Thomas Perez
Key Points
- Apopka High School’s Medical Careers Magnet won first place in two categories at the 6th Annual Orange County Biomedical Challenge on Feb. 24.
- Two teams of three students each competed and won in wearable health tech and misinformation/public health communication categories.
- Students prepared for two months and credited instructor Kristy Connor's strict reviewing for improving their research papers and presentations.
For the first time in the event’s six-year history, Apopka High School’s Medical Careers Magnet won two awards in the Orange County Public Schools Biomedical Challenge.
“I am incredibly proud to recognize the outstanding accomplishments of the Apopka High School students who competed in the 6thAnnual Health and Biomedical Challenge,” said school board member Melissa Byrd in a statement to The Apopka Chief. “After two months of dedicated research, preparation, and collaboration, both of our teams achieved first place in their respective categories —marking Apopka’s first-ever win in this competition. This win demonstrates their talent, teamwork, and ability to tackle real-world health challenges.”
Apopka High sent two teams of three students each to the Feb. 24 competition at AdventHealth Nicholson Center. Students Thomas Perez, Yamin Simjee and Cristian Medina won in the wearable health tech & remote monitoring category. Their peers, Dilion Falloon, Jezabel Colon and Makayla Smith competed in the misinformation & public health communication category. Seven schools competed in the first category, while eight competed in the second.
Magnet instructor Kristy Connor said the students practiced their presentations in front of fellow high schoolers for three weeks before the competition. They also started the research process in December.
“I did not force students to do the competition; all six of the students that competed for Apopka chose to be there, and their passion was obvious,” Connor said in a statement to the Chief. “It says a lot about Apopka that we only took two teams to compete and both teams won in their chosen category.”
Perez said that since the school performed poorly in the first two biomedical challenges, Connor was leaning toward not entering the competition. But Perez wanted to try again.
“I wanted to claim a victory,” Perez said. “I actually spent a week going to her every single day, nagging her about it, until I finally convinced her to allow us to compete.”
Perez attributes the victory to Connor’s “nitpicking.”
“For part of the project, we had to write a five-page research paper to go along with the presentation that we were giving, and I say we had to rewrite that research paper about seven times, because every single time, she would find some error,” Perez said. “It’d be so much as a random error, as in you forgot to cite a source or you missed a comma or punctuation mark, and she had us rewrite the whole paper just because of that.”
Perez said his team’s campaign efforts reached more people in the community than their competitors did, which led to their victory. However, the win still came as a surprise.
“Olympia [High School] has always won first place in multiple categories, so we honestly did not expect to win,” Perez said.
Ultimately, Perez is proud of how his team was able to “fight through” things like “miscommunication” and other difficulties to win the victory.
“I think it really gave us a boost of our self-esteem,” Perez said. “A lot of us think that Apopka — [that] we have iffy education and iffyteachers, and our school’s just whatever, we’re a little ghetto. But it showed us that, no matter our background, we’re able to make it somewhere.”