EMMA KELLY ’16
Much of first semester of Junior year at Seattle Prep is spent working on the National History Day Paper. At the end of last semester, those papers that stood out and demonstrated hard work and excellent writing were chosen by their Collegio teachers to be submitted to the National History Day contest. Two papers from each Junior Collegio were picked, making a total of eight papers from Prep to be submitted. These eight students are Anna Ferron, Kyle Lydon, Martin Padilla, Elizabeth Shields, Hannah Shiferaw, Connor Garand, Lillie Brown, and Jack Clancy.
Those who have had their papers chosen to be in the competition will now go back and put much more work in to their papers. Having their papers submitted requires much more work for the students and entails re-editing, re-wording, and at times even re-writing parts of their NHD papers. After turning in NHD at the end of last semester, most of these students thought that they were done with it for good. Little did they know they would continue working later on. One student, Kyle Lydon, says “I would never have guessed I’d still be working on NHD right now”.
Every year, a theme is chosen for the papers to be written about. The theme of this year’s competition was Leadership and Legacy. Many people chose to write about famous individuals, but anything that involved the legacy of some group, person, or event was acceptable. This year’s paper topics ranged from Harvey Cushing, a famous neurosurgeon, to Jimmy Carter and the Iran Hostage Crisis.
The papers that have been submitted have the opportunity to go one to the state competition or even further to the national level. The top eight papers from the regional contest move on to state. From there, the top three papers that are chosen then move on to the national competition. Nationals is held at the University of Maryland in June and every person who’s paper makes it this far is required to be present at it.
Historically, Prep students have done very well in this competition. In the past years, papers written by Prep students have consistently placed in state and even continued on. Last year, Prep student Max Kroeger ’15 placed at state and was one of the few to continue on to the national competition.
These eight students whose papers were chosen, along with the rest of the Junior class put huge amounts of effort into their NHD papers and should be proud of their hard work.