what’s all the pubbub about?

August 18, 2025

The Publicity committee at MIT SciOly takes care of the media presence and outward appearance of the club! We shape how MIT SciOly presents itself to the public, which is honestly a lot of power if you think about it. Some of the main things we do include managing our social media and designing merchandise. The specifics of what we do are mostly up to the individual members to initiate — part of the reason I love Publicity is I can do whatever I want and people go along with it. In this post, I’ll cover the social media/marketing side of Publicity, which has been my main role so far.

Branding

When thinking about how we want to brand our tournament, MIT SciOly is lucky to have carved out a niche for itself already. Being generally recognized for having difficult (but high-quality) tests and attracting so many competitive teams is both good and bad: It’s awesome that our tournament is overall highly regarded, but we also don’t want to be super unapproachable. In addition, if something goes wrong (cough cough awards), everyone knows about it which can be a little scary.

Ultimately, the vision we have is for the tournament to present a high-quality experience from the first time you hear about MIT SciOly to the moment you leave our campus. It’s of course not something we succeed in completely, but as a club we do work very hard towards this goal. Over the past two years, I think we’ve been trying to push our graphics and marketing materials towards being more representative of our tournament as a whole: cohesive (think our bright-color-against-black color scheme + the green-blue gradient logo), professional, but still fun and exciting.

Social Media

Our biggest audience comes from our Instagram account @mit_scioly, which I believe is the second-largest SciOly related Instagram account (HUSO we are coming for you). Again, MIT SciOly is really fortunate to be a well-known tournament already; ES and competitor recruitment are two things we usually don’t have to worry about too much. So, that lets us spend a lot more time on fun initiatives – this year, the account has been the most active it’s ever been and we’ve taken on a new initiative nearly every month of the year.

Timeline

October: New member intros – we welcomed 13(!) new PC members this year and we were very excited to introduce them.

November: We had around ten PC members do Instagram takeovers on our story. Credit goes to UCSD Science Olympiad(?) for being the first college SciOly club to do takeovers (that I saw).

December: Volunteer recruitment is actually something we stress out a lot about — our goal is usually to recruit at least 100 volunteers to keep our tournament running smoothly. I think we usually fall a little short of how many volunteers we actually need, so it’s definitely something we need to keep working on. For this, we advertise on Instagram, Discord, MIT mailing lists, with physical flyers, and begging our friends.

January: Unsurprisingly our busiest month on social media. We started doing the 7-day countdown two years ago with daily posts for the seven days leading up to the tournament. This year, we upgraded (thanks Keona!) both graphically and content-wise. Last year, we just posted the names of a few event supervisors every day. This year, since the list of Event Supervisor was already public on the website, we alternated between PC and ES introductions and also gave some insight into what each of the PC committees do.

The reels we made this year seemed to be pretty popular with our audience, though the event supervisors really upstaged the planning committee in terms of reel performance… Huge thanks to the PC and ESs who appeared in the videos either voluntarily or involuntarily though. Can’t wait to make more videos soon and finally achieve my dreams of becoming a famous influencer! Just kidding, but you can feel free to send me ideas for new videos at heidi@mit.edu. 10k followers and I start trying to become a famous studytok influencer.

Post-Tournament

After our tournament concluded, we’ve been a lot less active on the Instagram account. We posted some pictures from the tournament and then decided to chill out a bit. Except… we were actually working on blogs! Throughout March, we were setting up and writing drafts of blog posts, which are now being released!

We also did an April Fool’s post that quickly became our most-liked and most-shared post by a wide margin!* Shoutout to Elisa for the idea and Richard for helping out with the writing.

UPDATE: So our 2026 tournament announcement post did quite well… reaching 90,000 views and completely smashing the most-liked/most-shared record from April Fool’s. That was unexpected – I think we gained nearly 1000 followers just from that one post. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if we reached the correct audience as it seems like most of the people getting the post recommended were either college students or international high schoolers. However, it was still super cool to see the likes and shares racking up by the day.

Conclusion

There are so many different roles that go into running a tournament, and each one is essential. I usually joke that all I do is “make the silly little Instagram posts,” but publicity truly is an important part of the team. And you don’t have to stick to just one area! While my main focus has been with this committee that I love dearly, I’ve also had the chance to help out and learn from nearly every other group (sorry Admin Logs). Overall, I’d highly recommend getting involved —whether that’s volunteering at a local invitational, ES’ing or taking on an exec position—if you’re looking to build new skills and take on a bigger role in the SciOly community post-high school.