After submitting my application, complete with my chemistry teacher's recommendation and notes that my mentor's forms and a recommendation from my RSI tutor Jenny in Bulgaria would be coming separately, it was time to relax and catch up on all the schoolwork I'd been completely neglecting in order to finish revising my paper.

Finally the date of the semifinalist announcement arrived. I was at school for a Science Olympiad meeting at 3:00 when results were to be posted, but couldn't get to the website because of traffic. After a brief run around the school with friends to see if perhaps it was only the computer we'd been using that couldn't get to the results, I broke down and called my mom. She is an interesting character when it comes to the Internet--excited about it like most cool old folks, but actually competent. She had gotten to the Intel announcement when it was posted, a minute or two before 3:00, and gave me the good news as soon as she heard my voice. My friends started jumping with me; the science team coach asked what it was. (Even though Intel is a "big deal" to people who know what it is, it's not universally known.) Once I got home from school, I checked the website for myself and was ecstatic to see that 20 other students from RSI had been named semifinalists, along with my friend Amrita, a fellow Massachusett sent to Texas for Siemens regionals.

Now there were only two weeks until the finalist announcement. I'd tried not to think so far ahead, but now it was hard to avoid, much as I tried to expect the probable. The night before the online announcement, I'd heard, phone calls were made to all of the finalists. IMing with my friends from RSI that night, I jumped as I found out that several had made this next cut. I have to also admit feeling just a tiny bit irrationally disappointed; my struggle not to hope for a call hadn't quite worked. There was only one phone call for me that night, and that was from the school guidance office: the principal wanted to meet with me the next morning about my plan to graduate a year early. Ugh. We didn't even have school that day because of teacher workshops or somesuch. So I had to get up early, I had to go get possibly-bad news about being able to graduate, and I knew I wouldn't be going on the Intel competition.

My parents and I dutifully showed up at the school the next morning for the meeting with the principal. It was a real meeting, squashing my last hopes that maybe this was just a way to tell me I'd been named a finalist in person. But not much went on. Basically, the principal told me I'd graduate as planned, and that I could come to graduation and prom if I wanted, and I nodded and wondered why I needed to be woken up for this.

But then the principal's secretary leaned into the office to let us know there was a visitor, and my guidance counselor and the other administrators in the room all smiled. In walked an Intel representative and a photographer from the local paper, taking picture after picture. He walked up to me and asked if I knew why he was there. "I have a--a--hope of why you're here..." I stammered, unable to keep a grin off my face at this point. My hope was correct. He launched into a very eloquent description of the Intel competition which I caught maybe half of as I tried to climb out of the chair to shake his hand. It's a wonderful moment to remember when I'm upset about something. All I can remember of the next half hour is a blur of giddiness, with a huge foamboard check for pictures and a lot of hugs. Once the list was posted there was even more cause for excitement--four other students from RSI would be at the STI as well! (And not just due to some strange acronym nepotism!)

The first thing I did in preparation for the STI was to buy a formal dress, since I didn't have anything that even vaguely resembled ``black tie attire'' for the final evening of the week. Hey, there had to be some concession to the fact that I'm a teenage girl. Then it was time to start preparing for real. Intel occupied most of my nervous energy--if not most of my time--for the next month or so. I worried a lot about little logistical questions like how to transport my project board, and took absolutely forever figuring out how to design a poster. (Printing turned out to be a nightmare in and of itself!)