We are the Events committee, MIT Science Olympiad’s largest sub-committee and the backbone of the tournament! We manage all logistics related to the tournament’s 23 events and 3 trial events. While competitors rarely interact with us directly, you can see the impact of the decisions we make during the tournament itself from the exams that went through our thorough event review process to the venues and materials we acquired to host each event.
Our responsibilities range from big decisions like selecting the current season’s event supervisors (ESs) to smaller yet essential tasks like getting MIT admin approval for our build and lab events. While our committee only has 10 members, we work closely with other committees whether it’s Admin Logs booking event venues/assisting with MIT admin approval, Comp Logs communicating Events details with coaches, or Finance reimbursing ES travel and purchasing materials.
From the competitor’s side, we may seem mysterious, so we hope this blog post gives both competitors and aspiring MIT ESs a good sense of what we do behind the scenes. Another aim is to show other invitationals how we organize our tournament structure so that we can all provide better experiences for future SciOly kids.
One major benefit of organizing for MIT Science Olympiad is that we have years of past expertise and documentation to guide us through the process. For instance, we are eternally grateful for Yoshihiro Saito, 2021-22 Tournament Director, who still continues to help us by answering our numerous questions, coordinating some day-of logistics, and, of course, ESing.
Figure 1. A photo of Yoshihiro Saito on the ceiling of Building 36 from the 2023 MIT Invitational’s Saito Search. Photographed in November 2023, 10 months after the tournament.
At the end of the day, we are all college students being perpetually blasted by the MIT firehose, but we volunteer for SciOly because we are passionate about providing a meaningful experience for high schoolers around the country.
This is the Events Committee’s general timeline for planning each year’s tournament, which is an overview of general tasks we aim to complete within the given time frame.
Month | Tasks |
---|---|
Sept – Oct | On-boarding new Planning Committee (PC) members ES Selection → ES Orientation Fall inventory |
Nov – Dec | ES travel approval ES materials request → New materials acquisition Event review process Select event venues & trial events MIT admin & EHS approval |
Jan | Finalize exam review & room assignments Coordinate ES hosting Week-of prep Tournament day! |
Feb – Mar | Exam release Spring inventory Post-tournament discussions & documentation |
Over the next few weeks, we plan to release the following series of blog posts for you to see the complete behind the scenes of the MIT Science Olympiad Events Committee. These blog posts are all co-written by various members of the Events Committee.
Feel free to email us at scioly@mit.edu if you have any questions you would like the Events Committee to answer through these blog posts!