Christian Varughese, a senior here at WHS, is president of the Westborough High School Rocketry Club. In an interview with Varughese, he discusses his involvement in the club, the group’s accomplishments, and their goals for the remainder of the year.
Essentially, the WHS Rocketry Club is exactly what it sounds like, the team puts a lot of time and effort into creating the perfect rocket. Varughese explains that the way rocketry works is there is a country-wide competition called ARC, the American Rocketry Challenge, where they have the opportunity to come up with a rocket that matches a set of given constraints. The team then has to design, build, and test a rocket worthy of getting the best score at the competition. Almost 900 teams across the country participated in this competition. Out of those 900 teams, the top 25 teams that win go to DC to participate in the final competition, where they have the chance to win a large sum of prize money that goes to the school and club funds.
When Varughese first joined the club as a sophomore, he didn’t know a single thing about rockets. In fact, he had joined because one of his friends was in the club. Varughese worked hard with the other members to learn the skills that he needed. Although it took some time, he began to really enjoy the club.
“After being in the club for a while, I’ve fallen in love with Rocketry,” Varughese says. The club has fostered his love for engineering and rocketry. He explains how rocketry has had such a big impact on him, and he plans to make rocketry his major in college.
By junior year, Varughese was Vice President of the club, and this year, he is President of the club. When asked about his rapid rise in status, he shared a story from his first year on the team back in 2022. On the day of the launch, the rocketry team was on the field with the rocket, running some tests. When the team was going to launch the rocket, however, they realized that they were missing an important part. They thought they would have to go back, get it from school, and call off the launch, which would set them back two weeks behind in the competition.
Most of the underclassmen on the team were not sure what to do, but Varughese approached the club leaders and pitched a plan that he had, which would use a random material they had lying around to substitute the part that they were missing. Varughese then constructed the needed part out of scrap material, and when testing it with the rocket, it worked fine and saved their rocket launch for that year. This was his first year in the club, and the leaders of the club considered this event when they chose him to be vice president the following year. Junior year, Varughese continued to work hard and was a part of a subset of the club, called the TARC Team, which is basically a group of the leaders of the club, and eventually became president his senior year.
As for the community of this club, Varughese describes it as being, “like a bunch of friends hanging out after school.” The people there are friendly and always great to work with. Something he wishes to change though, is the enforcing of rules. He describes the club as having been, “let loose”, as there are not many requirements to be in the club. In fact, some people come and go how they please.
Varughese looks up to the robotics club, as he admires how they have their group structured. “One thing I learned from the robotics team is how professional and organized they are.” He wishes to apply that same professional atmosphere to his club to increase productivity.
One of the biggest achievements of the Rocketry Club was when they built a rocket that had a really good score when tested. Before getting into the achievement itself, Varughese explained the concept of scoring in rocketry. The scoring in rocketry is kind of like golf: you want to get the lowest possible score. He explained that a score under 20 is great, and a score under 10 is incredible. The winner of the competition last year had a score of 7. The WHS rocketry team launched their rocket 3 days before the competition’s closing day. Before the officials from ARC came, the team ran a few test runs to see how good their rocket was. After reviewing the results, they had scores of 5, 7, and 11, all of which are incredible. This gave them an excellent chance of not only being in the top 25 teams to go to DC, but to win the entire national competition. Unfortunately, by the time the officials arrived, a freak weather change occurred, and their score went from 5, 7, and 11, to 63, 72, and 81. Although this event was really unfortunate for the team, Varughese keeps a positive mindset for his club, saying “It shows that we as a rocketry club have the capability to win this year’s competition, even though we had some bad luck last year.”
Varughese expressed how he is really excited about the competition, and he thinks that this year they will do well. He mentioned how they already have a design for the rocket, even though it is still early in the school year. He shares an interesting story of when they were teaching the new club members how to use the software to create the rockets. One of them created a design with many mistakes, and Varughese originally planned to use it as a learning moment for the other kids to show them what the mistakes were in the design. Once they fixed the mistakes in the design, it was flawless, and they decided that that would be the design of the rocket they would use to build off of. When asked if he thought his team would win this year, he replied confidently, “Yes.”
Through his many experiences as a consistent member of the rocketry club, Christian Varughese has experienced many things to get him to where he is today and has big plans for the future of his club. What Varughese has done and is doing, has been completed through his enjoyment of rocketry, and his determination to win.
