Amelia Middle School student Tyler Thompson placed seventeenth in the 2008 Ohio State Geography Bee held in Columbus April 4.

“I was very proud of myself,” Thompson said. “Especially when the Geography Bee director told the final group that we had made the top 100 out of the more than 100,000 students in the state who competed.”

Thompson said that he was not expecting to do as well as he did, since the first few questions were easy but progressively got harder and harder (some he had to guess on).

“It was a very exciting competition,” he said. “Everybody there was very nice and supportive.”

Thompson, an Amelia eighth-grader who wants to be a doctor or an engineer in the future, was the first student challenger at Amelia Middle School, and the West Clermont School District, to ever advance to the finals in the annual state geography competition.