Every Wednesday in room G-4, Amador’s Technology Student Association (TSA) meets to prepare their projects for regional and national competitions.
“TSA is a competition based club… At the beginning of the year, you sign up for different events. It can be in any kind of event, anything from engineering to fashion,” TSA member Harshitha Guruprasav (‘27) said.
More Than Just Technology
The name may cause some mix-ups: many students have the assumption that TSA is about airport security, while even more students have the wrong assumption that TSA is only about technology. But In fact, the National TSA Conference offers over 75 events in subjects ranging from digital photography to finding ways to help children learn language
“The ones that off the top of my head would be forensics, biotechnology, webmasters, things like that. And then there’s also like extemporaneous speech, depending on what your interests are,” TSA co-president Leela Mallya (‘27) said.
Other events include board game design, video game design, geospatial technology, and music production. Leadership events, like extemporaneous speech, test knowledge of technology and students’ abilities to think on their feet.
“For extemporaneous speech, I remember my topic one year was about AI and how we can implement it into school and whether that’s a good idea or not. But then at nationals, the question was related to TSA and how that can be integrated in the future,” Mallya said.
Most events begin working on their projects months in advance. During lunch meetings, older club members can help new competitors hone their submissions.
“Last year, the prompt was something about creating a vegetarian or vegan website. The students competing in that have to actually go and design all of this, create all of the different things that they’d want to sell, what ingredients are in it. So it’s not just a surface level project. They actually have to go and do more than just the baseline research,” Mallya said.
Learning on the National Stage
Students who do well in February’s regional competition advance to the national conference. This year, the competition will be held in Washington, D.C. The event even draws international students, allowing Amador students to broader their horizons and learn from their peers.
“You see like fully working in electronics there, like really good engineering projects, things that are like really complex, and it really motivates you to work harder on your own projects and like growing your own expertise in different areas,” Guruprasav said.
All in all, TSA is about much more than technology. Students learn to collaborate, compete, and implement technology responsibly into everyday life.
“I’m here part of the game in TSA is the collaboration of learning new things. Because at TSA, I’m learning about new things that people don’t even know about. Before I didn’t even know that much about the content as well. It’s giving me an opportunity to learn new concepts,” TSA member Vishnu Sundary (‘28) said.
