As the school year ends, the last weeks of school prove to be special for the BioScience Academy as the seniors prepare to leave and a new cohort of BioScience students come in. BioScience commemorated this symbolic farewell by hosting the Fiesta Awards and Demonstrations (FAD) night on May 30, 2024. This event shows the new Bioscience parents what their kids will learn while in Bioscience. The night also allows for the seniors’ families to watch their kids give a final goodbye to their academy and receive distinguished awards for their time committed to the pathway. We were just going to present what we had learned for the new parents and then the old parents leaving.” — Samantha Jacobson ‘26
FAD night is planned by the FTHS service committee, a subsect of the HOSA – Future Health Professionals program, and the senior lead of this committee is Shayna Dearman-So. Students and volunteers started to plan FAD night back in January. The event would allow the three cohorts to show what they had learned that year at the interactive open house prior to the awards ceremony.
Mika Anderson, BioScience Academy director, stated, “[FAD night] was primarily set up by the FTHS service committee from HOSA, the committee dedicated to doing school functions for us … the hardest conflict was that I was pretty much the only teacher on campus doing the event, but I had a lot of amazing help.”
FAD night began in the Media Center where two seniors from BioScience explained to the new parents what their child would be experiencing from sophomore year through senior year. They continued by explaining HOSA and how they help the program and what it does for BioScience. The seniors then went over how BioScience receives its funding as a program itself and how grants and parents help contribute toward that. Lastly, they went over the communication of the program and how it works for the whole of BioScience.
Taylor Liston ‘24 said, “FAD night is one of the biggest events that we hold where all the Cohorts are involved … It’s a night to celebrate the seniors, but everyone is there to help showcase the academy and run the event.”
Students led the parents to the interactive open house to show what type of things that the incoming students would be learning in BioScience. Two groups of sophomores were located outside of Anderson’s room and inside the classroom’s pod, along with juniors inside Anderson’s room and seniors in Daniel Baker’s room. In each of these areas, there were groups of people displaying different topics that students had learned thoroughout the BioScience experience.
The sophomores had experiments that presented what they learned throughout the year. The juniors displayed health procedures or anything that helped them learn more about the human body through their time in MedTech. Lastly, the seniors had more experiments that were about what they had learned during their last year in the academy. Every grade answered questions that parents had about BioScience or anything other information about the class.
After the open house was over, the incoming BioScience parents left while the senior parents were sent into Spirito Hall for dinner. The parents and seniors there were served dinner, drinks and dessert before the awards started. After parents settled in, Anderson announced that before the awards began there would be a skit by the juniors called: Lab Coats vs. Scrubs. The riff off between the two made the crowd laugh and smile as they both sang about health and safety in the lab and in the end, they both were determined to be equally as important as Anderson stated both had equal importance in science technology engineering and mathematics (STEM). Both Labcoats and Scrubs proceeded to sing a final song in unity before the ceremony finally began.
At the beginning of the ceremony, two senior speeches were presented by Cameron Hubner ’24 and Liston, where they proceeded to describe their journey through BioScience and how it was finally coming to an end. Before the certificates and cords were passed out, Anderson gave a speech about how special Cohort 18 was as it was the class that applied through Covid and how hard it is to see them all go. It is their last communicating event together as a Cohort and the event that celebrates three years of really hard work” — Mika Anderson, BioScience Academy director
Then the cords and certificates were appointed. there were two types of cords; a blue cord meant you have been with BioScience for three years and completed your A-G requirements, and the green cord was the same with the exception that the student joined BioScience a year later. Afterward, they passed out paper plate awards to each student who then received a goodie bag.
After the cords and plates were passed out, the exemplary awards were handed out to very special students who proved to go above and beyond, and they all received a pin to wear for graduation. Then, there was a senior tribute award to Katelyn Neasham ’24. At the end of the awards ceremony, they played a video to say goodbye to all their seniors made by Neasham. The last award, the parent appreciation award, went to Shilpa Pakala Reddy.
By the end of the night, seniors walked away with recognition as they said their final goodbye to the BioScience program. As Cohort 18 prepares to leave, Cohort 21 awaits its time in the BioScience program.
