The results of the Scholastics arts and writing competition were released recently, and many McLean students took home an honorable award.

“Scholastics is a competition that is hosted every year and it allows people to get scholarship money and it helps them get their work out there,” Photography teacher Jennifer Singh said. 

In this art-focused competition, students compete in the art, photography, and ceramics categories.

Out of many winners, junior Ethan Kang obtained a gold key, the highest honor, for his photo titled, “Fish in the Bamboo Tree”. 

“This was an award for arts and writing, and so basically you get scholarships if you get a gold key. There are three parts of the award, the gold key, the silver key, and the honorable mention, and I got the gold key. The photo I took was called Fish in the Bamboo Tree,” Kang said. “So basically what it looks like is, there’s a fish in a fish tank which is surrounded by bamboo trees.”

The Scholastics are held for students to present their art. Students first start off at the County level and then move on to the National level. There is a gold key, silver key, and honorable mention in which the gold and silver get to have their work displayed to the public. 

“My role is pretty much just facilitating people to submit stuff, so they can kind of get the word out about the competition,” Singh said. “We can submit stuff from class, but students sometimes submit stuff outside from class.”

“The way it works is like, if you get the gold key, your project gets sent to New York [along with] almost 20,000 people. There are people in New York that judge you for it,” Kang said.

This year proved to be very successful for McLean, as many students like Ethan Kang received honorable recognition for their hard work.