Be careful - You may get what you wish for!

After weeks of agonising wait, I've finally received the excellent news that I have managed to secure a spot on the team to the IPhO 2006 in Singapore. That's the International Physics Olympiad for you, and not the International Photography Olympiad, so that means there will be no more of the shilly-shally dilly-dallying that I'm so prone of doing.

Admittedly, we're the underdogs of the competition, as we have been in all the other international olympiads the country has been in. There's actually a flip-side to this - we won't be expected to perform outstandingly, and so there's much less pressure on us 'to maintain excellence', like there is for the Singaporean and Chinese teams. Brunei's participation in Olympiads is really a new thing, and so far we've only been represented at the International Mathematics Olympiad (waaay back in 1999), the International Biology Olympiad, and several other regional olympiads. A sufficiently structured screening and training program for these olympiads just does not exist yet, so there really is a lot of potential for improvement. I firmly believe that if training camps were established, there is no reason for Brunei not to do well in any of the Olympiads.

Training for the IPhO began on Friday, and will continue twice a week for the next three months, up till the competition in July. I'm going to have to get used to not having a single free day anymore as my Fridays and Sundays will be gobbled up by Physics training - not so bad as I've had sufficient practice from last year's Maths Olympiad. So it's back to doing homework in the car on the drives up to Bandar and back, and handing in extremely untidy scripts as an added challenge for the teachers to decipher...MUAHAHA!