Our Senior Chemistry students have been participating in the local and international Chemistry Competitions on offer in 2022.

On the 28th of June some of our budding Year 13 chemists headed to the University of Waikato for the The New Zealand Institute of Chemistry (NZIC) Analytical Chemistry Competition. These students spent the day in one of the Chemistry laboratories at the University to experience working in a lab environment and get a taste of this subject at a tertiary level.

Our participating teams consisted of Michael Lin, Jovan Xin, Aidan Webster, Maanav Tomar, Siddharth Ashok Kumar, Aaron Yang, Arjun Vijayanand, and Muhammad Mohamad Hanafiah.

Also in Term 2, several students sat the online International Chemistry Quiz run by the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. This competition includes about 95,000 Chemistry students in over 20 countries. Impressive results were achieved by the following students:

Year 13 High Distinction:  Michael Lin and Nathanael Loy

Year 12 High Distinction:  Alex Liu and Eddie Bi 

Distinction:  Ryan Bosch

Three Year 12 Chemistry students, Alexander Mayo, Alex Liu, and Samuel Priest, have started their journey towards selection for the NZ Chemistry Olympiad team. These students recently sat an online examination with good results (Gold Certificates for Samuel Priest and Alex Liu and a Silver Certificate for Alexander Mayo). They all have qualified for the next round of online teaching and assignments from University of Auckland Chemistry lecturers. There are still multiple selection rounds and we wish these students well in this very hard fought competition.

On the 29th of October, ChemQuest (a Year 12 competition) was again held at the University of Waikato after being cancelled in 2021 due to COVID-19. There were 48 teams from across the Waikato Bay of Plenty region and one of the HBHS teams placed third. Congratulations to Josef Gillgren, Alex Liu and Alexander Mayo, and we hope they will enjoy their prize money.