The Teammates

At the IPhO, I met quite a few people who had been to the IMO (International Mathematics Olympiad). A number of them were in fact qualified to take the IMO with their country this year, but opted to attend the IPhO instead. It was a tough decision for many because there was an unfortunate clash in dates this year - the IMO 2006 in Slovenia was to run from July 10 - 18, whereas the IPhO 2006 in Singapore was held from July 8 - 17.

A photo by Prof. Gorzkowski from the IPhO 2005.

After my participation in the SEA-Mathematics Olympiad last year, I had high hopes of being able to attend the IMO this year. The IMO is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads, and has been held since 1959. By comparison, the IPhO has been held since 1967, the IChO (International Chemistry Olympiad) since 1968 and the IBO (International Biology Olympiad) since 1990. In fact, I was so keen on attending the IMO that I spent the majority of my December Holidays on solving past competition problems.

The 2006 school year then started, and in February, I received the unfortunate news that Brunei's participation in the IMO would not be approved, although I'm yet to fully discover the reason behind this. Meanwhile, my school received an invitation to send two of its students to sit for a Team Selection Test for the IPhO 2006. Supposedly, the criteria for being selected was (as with all things of this nature) that one had to be a citizen, and having fulfilled that requirement, one also had to have achieved one of the highest rankings in the individual's school Physics finals last year.

As always, I'm opposed to selecting students for Olympiads based on their school performances. I would never have attended the Maths Olympiad last year, had this rule really been enforced. The reality is that achievement in Olympiads does not correlate all that well with achievement in school exams. Whereas the former tests skills in creativity and problem solving, the latter only tests recall, and the ability to conform to a collection of set rules. With sufficient practise on old problems, one can do well on school exams. Olympiads require one to innovate, not regurgitate memorised information.

The results of the team selection was announced in April, and with that began a journey I would never forget. Helping to make the entire experience enjoyable to me were my fellow teammates:

Syazwani, my roommate. At the Olympiad, we always had to get up early and just go! We hit bed very late, so there was a tendency to sleep past the waking call time. I had two mechanical alarm clocks, but they never seemed to work properly (I just keep hitting the snooze button and never get out of bed!). Everyone suffered from the same problem, except Syazwani. The poor girl had to convince me to get out of bed a few times - not easy, I tell you.

Salwa. I don't think I've ever seen her without a smile on her face. No doubt she's the most photogenic of the lot, thanks perhaps in a large part to her trusty companion, the sleek Sony Cybershot T30. Unfortunately, she picked up a few bad things from me. A lame attempt by me to translate from English to Malay has ended up being her favourite phrase for dismissing people - "Berbual dengan tangan saya!"

Chee Hau. He was extremely discreet in his attempt to learn more about a certain, secret crush from Jordan. During boring lectures, he ingeniously used the camera zoom function to gather more information about said crush.

Azrul. He ditched his puny 64 KB memory stick for a 1 GB stick, an experience which he has found to be truly life-transforming. Everything merited photography after that, up to the point that every new kind of floor tile that we saw was meticulously documented.

Hmm, I think I want to go back and examine those floor tile pictures. I'll post more about the IPhO next time. :)