BISHOP —Bishop Union High School (BUHS) senior Alyssa Buchholz has been named the 2025 California Trig-Star champion. Miss Buchholz is a three-time local winner of the annual contest, which promotes the field of professional land surveying through a test that challenges students’ practical application of trigonometry. This year, Miss Buchholz completed the test with a perfect score in just under 16 minutes, a feat unsurpassed by any other student in California.
On Friday, May 23, she was presented a check for $1,000 from the California Land Surveyors Association by Caltrans Senior Transportation Surveyor Sereyna Cagle. Each spring, Ms. Cagle administers the Trig-Star program at BUHS, which includes a presentation about the land surveying profession in addition to the competitive test. This is the first time in the 12 years she’s overseen the competition that a local student won the statewide prize.
Caltrans Senior Transportation Surveyor Sereyna Cagle presents Bishop Union High School senior Alyssa Buchholz with a $1,000 check for her Trig-Star competition win.
The Trig-Star competition tests the students’ abilities to apply math to real-world situations and heightens the awareness of land surveying as a profession. Land surveying is the art and science of locating or determining (by measurement) the shape or size of any portion of the earth’s surface and representing these surveys on maps. The Trig-Star competition is sponsored by the National Society of Professional Surveyors, the California Land Surveyors Association, and Caltrans.
Miss Buchholz took the test along with other students from Bishop Union High School. Other top local finishers this year included:
- Teagan Orr, junior, 30 minutes and nine seconds
- Faye Spoonhunter, sophomore, 34 minutes and 52 seconds
- Oscar Woods, sophomore, 57 minutes and 56 seconds
Funding for the local competition came from the California Transportation Foundation (CTF) and the BUHS Mathletes. The CTF donated $175 for the competition, a figure that was matched by the Mathletes.