WAAAAAY Overdue: My take on the International Physics Olympiad (from here on, just IPhO).
Right, so on my very first day of university (OK, the first day I actually started learning here and slightly before I stopped learning...), there was a Science Bus meeting (the Science Bus is an Estonian thing, where university students go round to schools and abuse science, in an attempt to get kids to want to study it... It's worth a handful of posts, so I'll add it to the list of stuff to post on). In the meeting, some guy walked in and said, as he passed round a sheet of paper, "There's a big physics olympiad in the summer and we need volunteers to help organise it. Everyone interested, write your name and contacts down on this paper."
I forgot about that for the rest of the year. Suddenly, in February, I got an e-mail on the matter and a load of "courses" started happening, about how NOT to insult people from all over the world and stuff.
Turned out I was part of a sellect group called the "Calibrators", who were under oath NOT to speak of their work and only answered to the guy who had asked for our contacts half a year ago. No pressure.
Thus began the long (and I do mean long) series of courses and meetings that would prepare all the volunteers to take on the hundreds of Physicist wannabes (and geeks) from round the world. The courses generally took the whole day and took place once a month. I can't say I learned anything useful in that time... I DID, however, meet quite a few awesome people with whom I'd like to spend more time.
The courses were mostly boring, frankly speaking, and didn't have much to do with my role at the Olympiad. But I kept going, because of the people.In the first "course", we were told about the different roles:
- Guides
- Base staff (Organisers)
- IT
- Exam room staff
- Press
- Calibrators
The guides had the worst job, in my opinion. They had to show the foreigners around and babysit them for 10 days. That meant less sleep than the lightest sleeper in the team. each guide took on one country's competitors. The teachers, hopefully, being more mature, didn't need so many guides, so they were divided into a small handful of groups.
Calibrators were a select group of people who were in charge of the exam room. They called the shots and answered only to one person: the person who recruited them (yes, a bunch of badasses).
IT people dealt with the internet uplink between the Tallinn base and the exam room control center.
The Exam room staff helped the Calibrators in the exam room. They did the simple jobs that the calibrators gave them.
The Base staff dealt with the bases, which had the bigger picture in mind. They knew exactly who was where and for how long. They called every shot, except for exam room shots, for which they only had authority to request.
Press were the paparazzi and annoying interviewers of the entire show.
The idea was to have the teachers from each country in the capital of the small country, Tallinn, and send the students to Tartu, the university town (city?), where they would sit the exam. The teachers had to translate the exam papers, which were in English, to whichever language the students felt most comfortable with (there were some people from America and Canada, who got Chinese papers :P ). Translated papers were sent, via the internet the Estonians feel so proud of, to Tartu, where they were printed (the night before the exam). Answered papers were scanned in immediately after the exam to the Tallinn base for the teachers to mark and correct.
Preparation was supposed to take place in a relaxed continuous manner, having had a lot of time in advance to deal with it. I'm not sure how much work was NOT procrastinated, but it certainly felt like a heck of a rush to me. For at least three months after the start of the courses, no apparent work had been done. What made matters even more worrying was that the main organizers (the shot callers) were delegating some very important tasks to kids, and some rather important assignments were botched up (like the welcome video). Preparation suddenly hit high gear a month before the Olympiad. Stationary needed to be compiled, papers printed, stuff bought, et cetera. The IT group had to be trained in the use of the "special" machinery, calibrators needed to get the floor plan of the exam room set,set up archive plans for the answered test papers, protocol, procedure, timetables, resting times, 101s on how to calibrate stuff... It was quite crazy.
I had made the silly choice of giving myself two roles: calibrator AND IT. That meant that I had an annoying amount of stuff to do before the Olympiad:
- Check that there was a sufficient internet connection in EACH hotel our contestants would be staying in
- Master the HUGE printer/scanner combo machines we'd be using
- Print signs, which would be used in the exam room
- Help the archiving team with their printing work
- Set up both the Tallinn base as well as the exam command center.
- Set up special laptops, which would be used by the calibrating team
- Learn how to calibrate stuff
I had some really close deadlines on those, especially because I had other things to do and other places to be at a week before the start.
When the big thing finally started, the madness REALLY began. We had to move out of our homes for the duration of the Olympiad. The guides and organizers were in the same hotels as the students and teachers while the exam room teams (both of them) were in a hostel far away from the exam center (we got the worse deal :P ). The Tallinn base was set up on the first day, the Tartu and exam bases the following day, as the students made the journey to the university town. As the students checked in, the calibrators were on the spot, making sure the students had the correct calculators (the kind that DIDN'T plot graphs and do all the work for them). This exercise took most of the afternoon and half of the evening. The students who didn't have the correct calcs had to either buy new ones, or hope the organizers would let them borrow the limited number of spare calcs. That same evening the teachers began translating the tests. We were put into two shifts, so that we would all have half a goon nights sleep, at least. I got the second shift. That meant I had more work to do, because most teachers get done in the wee hours of the morning. Coffee was my best buddy (and I'm not a coffee drinker). The exam was the most annoying time. My feet were killing me, for having been on them for over 5 hours straight during printing AND during the exam, as I patrolled the floor. By the end, I was dead tired. But we still had to collect all the exam papers quickly, scan them and send them to Tallinn.
We had a good nights' sleep that night. The following day was free for the students. That meant we could prepare for the practical (yes, we punished them in theory AND practicals). Because of the incredible number of students, it had to be done in two groups (double the work for us). We calibrated, printed the answer sheets and the morning shift (including myself) went to bed early, leaving the second shift to finish off the calibrating and wait for the question papers. Exactly one hour after going to bed, we were all mobilized. The calibrating had gone sour and the guy in charge had ordered all hands on deck. I hadn't gotten any sleep that night, because I had been dealing with the two hotels that didn't have as good an internet connection as we had wanted (the students needed the internet for Skype conversations with their teachers in Tallinn, as their phones and all other forms of communication had been confiscated for the duration of the Olympiad). Ordering more coffee and cream from the Tartu base, we sleepily got everyone awake and off to the exam center. Twenty minutes into the re-calibrating the question papers started filing in. I was forced to dash up and begin the annoying printing process. When the re-calibrating had been done, the first shift got to sleep. Printing continued right through till a few minutes before the exam. The first part of the practicalls went relatively better than the theory. The real headache came when the first batch of students had to be kicked out, papers collected, scanned, stuff re-calibrated, room cleaned and new papers issued. All this had to be done in less than an hour, because by then the next batch of students came in. I have absolutely NO idea how we were able to do all that in one hour and 15 minutes, because that was a lot of work. The exam room was the Estonian University of Life Sciences sports center, with an open room the size of three basketball courts WITH room for bleachers. Into which had been placed 400 1.5m x 1m walled boxes (expo room kind). By the time the second batch was underway, we were all bushed. The morning shift had not slept at all and the evening shift was not in a better state either. It was the command center's new job to set up an ex prompt sleep regime, to let some people catch a few Zs during the exam. I was in charge of the command center. Just my luck. I had to help others get sleep while battling my own eyelids AND deal with the rush of other requests the center got during the exam. I remember at some point in time I couldn't take it much longer. surrounded by sleepers, I delegated the command center to someone else and fell asleep too. Too soon, I was woken up for the lase 45 minutes of the session.
That night we had to take apart the entire box system, pack up ALL the experiment apparatus into cute little boxes, so we could sell the stuff and clear out. I can't tell you how tired I was after that. I remember sleeping for two days straight and after joining the IPhO world again, found out that out of sheer joy of finishing all the papers, a handful of guides had broken the golden rule: "Thou shalt not drink alcoholic beverages during the duration of the Olympiad" and had subsequently gotten the sack. A handful of students were hospitalized with broken bones, lacerations, alcohol poisoning, and other inconveniences.
All in all, a very successful enterprise and some ANNOYING organization.
Note: This is how I saw it, and chose to interpret it. Under NO circumstances are all these statements true (most are) and my conclusions are NOT objective.
