Lawrence Fifth-Grader to Compete in Earth Science Competition

Excited and anxious, 11-year-old Rishika Maitra will test her mettle against some of the state’s best geography students today at the Connecticut Geographic Bee.

The Lawrence School fifth-grader will face off against 99 students from grades four to eight at Central Connecticut State University for a $100 prize, geography books and a trip to Washington, D.C., for the national finals this May to compete for a $25,000 scholarship.

Maitra won the Lawrence School geography bee earlier this year and passed a qualifying test to compete in the state competition. She then received a letter from the National Geographic Society — which is sponsoring the bee — informing her that she had been selected to compete in the state competition.

Since then, she has continued to practice — poring over atlases and reference books, playing quiz games on her computer and even fielding questions on world capitals from her father over the dinner table.

This will be the first major geography bee that Maitra has ever competed in, yet it is hardly the first time the accomplished young student has been recognized for academic or artistic excellence.

In 2009, while still in third grade, she won an honorable mention in the Edna and Benjamin Shenker Creative Writing Contest. That year, students were asked to write a short story or poem about the funniest thing that ever happened to them.

The next year, in 2010, while in fourth grade at Lawrence School, she placed first in the contest whose theme that year was “How I Would Make the World Better.”

This winter, Maitra placed second in the Middletown Fire Department’s Fire Prevention Poster Contest.

When in 2009, Lawrence School offered Connecticut Mastery Test practice games, she won the most games at her school, according to press reports.

Out of all her subjects, Maitra says she enjoys geography. “It is much more than just places. It’s culture. It fits into science,” she explained.

During the school bee at Lawrence, Maitra and her fellow students were asked questions about state, world and physical geography.

“An outline of the Great Lakes appears on the quarter of which state that borders four of the five lakes — Michigan or North Dakota?” was one of the questions.

This morning’s competition will be moderated by NBC News anchor Brad Drazen in Central Connecticut State University’s Welte Auditorium.

Preliminary rounds will begin at 9:45 a.m. while the final competition will start at 11:15 a.m.

With just a few days before having to compete against her fellow students, Maitra said that she was excited and looking forward to the competition. “I’ve been studying for a long time,” she remarked. “I can’t wait.”

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