On Saturday, November 3, 2018, Harriton High School’s Certamen team went to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut to compete in a Latin competition against other schools. Certamen is a competition where two to three teams of four people compete against one another in questions relating to Latin and Roman Culture in various categories. Categories include grammar, culture, history, mythology, mottoes, derivatives, and for the advanced teams, literature. The teams were as follows:

Novice

Team 1:

Nicholas Biglin

Camille Seignourel

Violet McShane

Alex Aukburg

Team 2:

Kate Messick

Gabrielle Schwager

Todi Skorupski

Allie Hollin (Substitute For Julia Lester)

Team 3:

Teddy Molineaux

Mikey Kotler

Jeff O’Neill

Nick Masterman (Not Present)

Intermediate

Team 1:

Sunme Zhao

Patrick McCann

Samuel Weissman

Team 2:

Riley Wexler

Noah Isenberg

Nina Hollin

Sophie Boulware

Team 3:

Carly Siciliano

Graham Branscom

Anna Manning

Advanced

Team 1:

Tai Groeneveld

David (Avery) Parr

Michael O’Connor

Guillermo Ribeiro-Vecino

The competition has 3 rounds: Preliminary, Semifinal, and Final. The 8 teams with the most amount of points after the Preliminary round move onto the Semifinals round, and out of the groups qualifying for Semifinals, the groups with the most points move onto the final round to compete for victory.

Novice Teams 2 and 3 advanced to the semifinals round, but lost there to Hunter College and Boston Latin School respectively.

In the end the competition was won in the Novice Section by Boston Latin School, in the  Intermediate Section by Basics DC, and in the Advanced Section by Boston Latin School once again.

Although Harriton’s teams did not take home a first place finish, they all did their very best and performed quite well, and deserve congratulations.