Ramkiran Krish (’24) – 1st Place in Creative Problem Solving

What event did you compete in?

I did creative problem solving. You compete in a team; mine was with two other people. The people at the event give you a prompt, and you and your team have roughly 30 minutes to come up with a solution to it and describe it on a poster board. The best solution to the problem against other teams [wins].

Did you expect to win?

To be honest, I wasn’t. We were waiting outside the room to go in and give our speech, and there were other kids competing who looked really prepare. They were also rehearsing, and we did not rehearse that much — we were just like, okay, we’ll go in and we will see what we get, and see what happens. When we got the win, it was pretty surprising. I think everybody on my team did two events, but we did not qualify for the first one, so we were like, if we do this it will be really nice. We were all really happy about it.

How did you prepare for the competition? Any challenges?

The problem was trying to find ways to prepare because there weren’t many resources online. We asked a former HOSA competitor about ways to prepare and he told us to go through sample prompts and practice speaking with your team because it’s also like a public speaking event to the judges. You have to have good composure, eye contact, good voice and all that. The night before, in Sacramento, we practiced a little bit of that. I guess when we were trying to think of a solution in the room, we were kinda arguing on how we could present this in a good way on our poster. That was a challenge, but in the end we got through it and picked a good solution.

What are your future goals?

We have the International Leadership Conference which is held in Texas in June. We want to try and get first place in that — that’s our goal.