This is how it works: The International competitions are calling!

This is how it works: In the 2024/2025 school year, thousands of young talents from all over Switzerland embarked on their Science Olympiad journey. In a series of articles, we followed the process, from the first round to the international competition. During each phase, the participants get to learn and connect. A look behind the scenes of our events shows the volunteer work that makes all this possible.

In Plato’s cave

Imagine you’re at the closing ceremony of a Swiss final of a Science Olympiad. You participated in a first round in class or on your own, attended camps or workshops, perhaps passed a second round, prepared for exams, essays or experiments and now here you are, waiting for your name to be called. To your surprise, you win a gold medal! While your fellow finalists applaud, the realization hits you: You are going to the international competition…

About the author: Lara Gafner is the president of the Swiss Philosophy Olympiad.

That’s how the story goes in most cases. However, sometimes, it’s a bit more complicated. When Hannah and Filipa received their silver medals at the final of the Philosophy Olympiad back in March, they didn’t expect that two months later, the two of them would represent Switzerland at the International Philosophy Olympiad (IPO) in Bari, Italy. Only two participants per country can attend the IPO and this year, the winners of the two gold medals could not make it. The first placed exceeded the age limit of 20, while the second placed had to write his International Baccalaureate exams on the same dates. So the spots were passed on. 

Something similar happened in 2022, when a gold medalist had to cancel on short notice, and silver medalist Mathys took his place. This made Mathys, who also succeeded at maths, one of the two people I know of who attended both the IPO and the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). The other is Leonhard from Liechtenstein, who attended IPO this year and the year before.

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Leonhard and Mathys comparing the two international competitions.

I met both of them two weeks before the IPO, at a training session of the Mathematical Olympiad where Mathys, now a volunteer, prepared participants for the so-called “team selection tests”.

Training session at the University of Bern. (Source: Lara Gafner)

At the Philosophy Olympiad, if everything goes to plan, it’s simple: The gold medalists get to go to IPO. In maths, I learn, it’s a bit more complicated: After the finals in early spring, all medalists prepare for more exams in May. It’s the results of those exams that determine the delegation, not the medals. One of several reasons for this is that students can make a lot of progress in a short time. 

Mathys teaching at the training session. (Source: Lara Gafner)

In 2020, when Mathys himself first qualified for the international team, he was far from winning gold at the national finals. Three years later, he ended being the second Swiss participant to win gold at the IMO. According to him, the main difference between the events is size. While IPO gets together about 100 students, IMO has over 600 participants. “IPO was this cute event, quite random sometimes, but also quite charming”, Mathys remembers .“The social vibe is quite different - I enjoyed IPO much more for that. Since it’s a smaller event, you can talk to everyone and befriend everyone”. The IPO is also not a 10-day-commitment, but a prolonged weekend trip. Since the event is traditionally held in May, not in the summer holidays, anything else would cause even more clashes with exam season. One might think that Thursday evening to Sunday noon is not enough time to make any meaningful connections. However, I have found that knowing just how little time one has can speed up the process of getting to know each other. “At the IMO, I have a few friends I sometimes talk to, but at IPO, a real group formed”, says Leonhard shortly before his second participation, eager to reunite with friends he made in Helsinki the year before. 

Leonhard (right), Eric and Svenja training for the team selection test. In 2024/2025, all three participated in the Swiss Philosophy Olympiad as well as its mathematical counterpart. While Leonhard qualified for both IPO and IMO, Eric made it to IMO and Svenja qualified for smaller regional competitions aborad. (Source: Lara Gafner)

Attending an IPO for the second time, like Leonhard and the other Liechtenstein delegate Patrick, does not necessarily mean you know what to expect. Having attended IPO regularly since 2014, as a participant and as a volunteer, I can say with confidence that every year is unique. Something as simple as the choice of accommodation leads to vastly different experiences for the participants. Like at other Science Olympiads, participants and delegation leaders spend much of the program separated. Unlike at other Science Olympiads, there are no volunteers assigned to delegations specifically to keep an eye on them. Participants going out together unsupervised is more common in philosophy, but not every setting supports this equally. Last year for example, the organizers managed to find a hotel that could accommodate all participants and their delegation leaders together in the city center, which allowed participants to mingle easily after the official program - or even, sometimes, instead of the official program.

This year, we knew in advance we would be split up into different hotels. We thought we’d have to make our way there ourselves, but as we stepped out of the night train at Bari Centrale, we were personally welcomed by one of the main organizers. 

From Zurich to Bari via Milano. (Source: Lara Gafner)

He swiftly whisked us away to two taxis waiting outside Bari Centrale. For the rest of our stay, chartered buses would pick us up from our respective hotels - unless we missed them. I must admit that, in the Swiss delegation, it was only ever delegation leaders who missed the bus, never our exemplary participants.

Source: Lara Gafner

With delegations scattered across the city, it was the participants staying in the same hotel who bonded first. The Swiss could often be spotted with the Americans, who were among the delegations from our hotel we went sightseeing with on the first day. 

Source: Lara Gafner

We strolled through the old town of Bari for a few hours, where Filipa and Hannah, who had been exchanging photography expertise on the train, got to use their fancy cameras. 

Source: Lara Gafner

At lunchtime, our large group confidently chose the tiniest place on the piazza. It was decided that participants would squeeze into the slim sandwich shop, while delegation leaders would crowd around a table outside.

Source: Joseph Murphy

From time to time, one delegation leader would go inside with another serving of antipasti, then come back outside and reassure us that the “children” were having a good conversation. At other Science Olympiads, I have observed more peer-like relationships between delegates and their leaders. Delegation leaders and participants at IPO are separated not only by age, but also by an understanding of roles that aligns more with a school setting than some sort of scientific scout troop. There are “teachers” and there are “students”. When the Swiss “teachers” are university students rather than seasoned high school teachers, they tend to be mistaken for “students” at the IPO. 

Guihlem from Switzerland, who studies at the University of Fribourg, and Raphael from Liechtenstein, who is actually a high school teacher, at a “teachers' table”. (Source: Lara Gafner)

The competition at the IPO comes in the form of an essay on the first morning. Students get four quotes to choose from, and four hours to write their essay. 

Leonhard from Liechtenstein writing his essay. (Source: IPO 2025)

Once they leave the exam hall, teachers swarm them right away, eager to ask two questions: “Which topic did you choose?” and “How did it go?”. 

The essay topics of IPO 2025. (Source: Lara Gafner)

The first is easy to answer - the second, not so much. 

Hannah and Filipa shortly before the essay writing. (Source: Lara Gafner)

“At first I thought I had a great idea, but then I realized I didn’t fully understand part of the topic”, Hannah answers when I ask her. She also adds that writing a philosophical essay in a foreign language is tricky. At IPO, everyone must write in English, French, German or Spanish, but no one can choose their national language, such that everyone shares the same disadvantage - at least in theory. In practice, this means a French-speaking Swiss participant could not choose German, which he learned in school, while an international student could choose English despite it being her first language. 

With the essay behind them, the participants can spend the rest of IPO enjoying the experience. 

Patrick from Liechtenstein (with sunglasses), enjoying the experience. (Source: Lara Gafner)

“Most of the time IPO felt way more like just a camp to hang out with other people”, Leonhard puts it. While he was happy to repeat his success from the previous year with another honorable mention, to him, the competition does not take up as much space at IPO as at IMO.“IPO feels way less competitive, most of the people I talked to saw it as a fun trip they got to do.” 

Source: Lara Gafner

While the participants go on a city tour or listen to lectures, the teachers, who also form the jury, get to work. In a process involving several stages and five criteria, they evaluate the essays, discussing their evaluations in groups or later in pairs, sometimes until late in the evening. 

Jonas Pfister, the founder of the Swiss Philosophy Olympiad, came all the way to Bari to suggest some improvements for the essay evaluation process. (Source: IPO 2025)

In Bari, we did not not do a night shift, but instead continued the next morning. Thanks to this, I was wide awake when I got to read my last essay of that evaluation, which struck me as the best I ever read at an IPO. My impression was confirmed when I found out it ended up as one of the two gold medal essays. 

Lara fawning about the golden essay with a Malaysian teacher... (Source: IPO 2025)

… who can also be spotted in the pictures from IMO. Seems like Leonhard was not the only one doing both! (Source: IMO 2025)

At IMO, about 50% of contestants receive some sort of medal. At IPO, it’s only about 10%. Until this year, Switzerland had only won a medal at IPO one single time, in 2008, so you can imagine our surprise when, in the middle of announcing the four silver medals, we suddenly heard the words: “From Switzerland… Filipa Lüthy!”

Filipa's Essay 

Filipa being interviewed by teachers from Kazachstan and Austria after the closing ceremony.  (Source: Lara Gafner) The result can be seen here. 

Those who have seen the images of a closing ceremony at another Science Olympiad might notice something missing at the IPO: flags. 

The closing ceremony. (Source: IPO 2025)

Holding up one’s flag on stage had never been much of a custom at IPO, and this year, it was explicitly discouraged. This caused much debate, for example, the question was raised whether participants in the IPO can even be seen as “representatives” of the countries they come from. Perhaps, the question was answered by the intensity of the applause when the first ever Palestinian delegation in IPO history rose from their seats at the opening ceremony.

There’s a famous part of Plato’s Republic called the “allegory of the cave”. It’s a story about people who spend their lives locked in a cave, seeing only shadows projected onto a wall. A philosopher, the allegory suggests, is like someone who was freed from this cave. At first, they’d be blinded by the light, but in time they would come to understand things the way they actually are. However, when the philosopher returns to the cave, not only do their eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness again, but they find their fellow prisoners indifferent or even hostile to their truths. Joking references to the allegory were absolutely everywhere, when, on the last afternoon of IPO 2025, students and teachers went on an excursion to the Castellana caves together. 

Descent into the cave. (Source: Lara Gafner)

Some participants seemed genuinely eager to learn about stalactites and stalagmites, however, for most of them, the cave was just another backdrop to continue their tireless discussions. On the rise of the far-right in their respective countries for example, or on Italian brainrot memes, which were big at the time. It turns out that, outside the realm of allegory, one does not need to leave the cave to be a philosopher. 

Filipa and Hannah in the cave. If Lara knew how to handle a fancy camera like they do, maybe you could even see them. (Source: Lara Gafner)

Nevertheless, there was one participant, only 15 years old, who evoked some of the spirit of the allegory. In a way, it’s not so different to the spirit of an event such as the IPO, where teenagers travel to find experiences, insights, encounters, maybe even a sense of belonging, that never quite translates to the everyday lives they left behind for those few days. As we were approaching the exit of the cave, the girl expressed her relief loudly by breaking into song, like a character from a Musical. 

And at last I see the light

And it's like the fog has lifted,

she sang - lines from the Disney movie “Tangled”. Her voice echoed off the cave walls, and she continued, all the way to the exit:

All those days chasing down a daydream

All those years living in the blur

All that time never truly seeing

Things the way they were

Now she's here shining in the starlight

Now she's here suddenly I know

If she's here it's crystal clear

I'm where I'm meant to be.

Group picture of everyone involved in IPO 2025. A group picture of IMO would probably not fit into the frame. (Source: IPO 2025)

Math down under: the common denominator

About the author: Tanish Patil volunteers for the ​Swiss Mathematical Olympiad and has been known to cook delicious egg fried rice.

Us mathematicians are an infamously snobby bunch. It certainly helps buffer our egos that our field of study is the most ancient and fundamental of all the sciences, and that our International Olympiad is also the oldest and most famous of them all. I’ll let you in on a little secret, though: math olympiads are a purely artistic endeavour, a medley of logic and creativity with almost no real-world utility. Strangely, we take a lot of pride in this fact, because it means we do what we do for the pure love of the subject and nothing else. You can’t really prepare for a math olympiad by learning or memorising anything - the only way forward is practice, so you have to truly adore the subject to thrive in doing something that only matters to you and your quirky troupe of comrades. How do you find the conviction to keep going? Well, the problems and their solutions are usually very beautiful, so the proverbial carrot on the stick is ever present. However, in my opinion, the reason people love mathematical olympiads is freedom: you can approach a problem any way you want, no rules, just you and your inner fountain of creativity.

Speaking of carrots, every good story starts with a mysterious fruit. Our story begins on the other side of the planet, on a famous little island called Australia. Did you know that Australia takes extreme measures to preserve its biosecurity and natural environment? You can’t bring in most food, and you even have to declare muddy boots and swimming trunks at border control. One of the contestants traveling to the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) 2025 - Andrej - got a bit spooked and decided to declare a banana that he wasn’t sure he’d actually taken, just in case it was there. Cue pandemonium as the authorities searched his baggage for a ghost banana that didn’t actually exist. I’m sure a practitioner of any other science would just have done the sensible thing and not talked about the banana, but ask a mathematician a simple question…

We first spent a week in Brisbane, training with the Slovenian delegation. 

Source: via Tanish Patil

Training camps are a huge part of the Math Olympiad experience - we’d had one with Germany and Austria a week prior, and our Slovenian crossover has been going on yearly for nearly two decades now. Many countries have training friendships with other countries in this manner - the Netherlands and New Zealand; England and Australia; Estonia and South Africa, just to name a few. Consequently, I knew my Slovenian counterpart, Luka, quite well - we’d been at 5 IMOs together. This meant working together was a breeze, and, along with Marco, one of the leaders of the Liechtenstein delegation, we cooked up some fun classes for the kids, along with an excursion into Brisbane so that the gang could actually touch grass and defeat the nerd allegations. 

Tanish teaching at the training camp. (Source: via Tanish Patil)

The teams also enjoyed some football, a tricky mock exam and the trials and tribulations of a first encounter with the notorious Australian condiment Vegemite. 

Emil tasting Vegemite. (Source: via Tanish Patil)

At the IMO, each delegation usually has two leaders who take on different roles during the competition. As for Switzerland and Liechtenstein, me and Marco remained at the training camp with the participants, while Julia and Valentin had to go to IMO earlier than us. We’ll catch up with them in a bit.

Working hard or hardly working? (Source: via Tanish Patil)

Come the end of the training week, we took the kids in tow (all thirteen of them - six each for Switzerland and Slovenia, and Leonhard representing Liechtenstein) and made our way back to Brisbane airport, where a bus whisked us to the Sunshine Coast, where IMO was held. All the students and their accompanying leaders stayed at one resort, with the proximity making it ideal for kids to be able to socialize between themselves, which is always great when it happens (not every IMO host city has a site able to take in 800+ people concurrently). 

I found myself saying hello to many kids as well, which was a side effect of being in charge of one of the most popular Instagram accounts about olympiad mathematics (you should check it out - but sorry for the brainrot). 

The opening ceremony was the following day teams typically try and do something cool as they pass on stage, in order to get a cheer from the crowd.

The opening ceremony. (Source: IMO 2025)

For some delegations, this is easier than others - Leonhard got a well-deserved acclamation for being the sole team consisting of a single contestant. 

Source: IMO 2025

There was also a huge ovation for the Palestinian team, who couldn’t make it the previous year because of visa issues, but saw three of the five team members make it to Australia. Strangely enough, because the organizers decided to have the teams pass in order of distance to Australia (as opposed to alphabetically, which is usually the case) they were immediately followed by the Israeli delegation, which must have been interesting whilst waiting in the queue. 

Whilst our moves on stage were underwhelming, our fashion was not - the team shirt was immensely popular with students and leaders alike. 

Source: IMO 2025

After the dust had settled, everyone started stressing about the exam. Being a responsible leader, I imposed an early bedtime and banned any talk of mathematics, although the ban was quite unsuccessful. The next morning heralded my inspirational speech pre-exam, with such insightful aphorisms as “This exam won’t matter in 10 years’ time, which is why you must make it matter today”. On the whole, I got the impression the team was quite pumped up and a lot less stressed, despite the verbiage, but perhaps I simply confused them so much they forgot to worry. Oh well - task successfully failed. 

The first exam day was quite nice, if on the easier side. One of the team managed to solve everything, which was a good sign, but also meant we should be wary of other teams doing better than expected too. I sentenced them to another math ban , which I’m sure was duly ignored, and went off to play cricket with the locals (of both the human and kangaroo variety). 

The second exam day brought with it a brutal reminder of the vagaries of Olympiad math with Problem 6, an astonishingly beautiful and completely impossible problem plucked straight from the mind of the devil. 

Problem 6. Consider a 2025×2025 grid of unit squares. Matilda wishes to place on the grid some rectangular tiles, possibly of different sizes, such that each side of every tile lies on a grid line and every unit square is covered by at most one tile. Determine the minimum number of tiles Matilda needs to place so that each row and each column of the grid has exactly one unit square that is not covered by any tile. (Source)

This, along with problem 3 being relatively approachable, meant a lot of students had solved exactly 5 problems, and speculation on how this would affect the cutoff for a gold medal began running rife. I had little time to reflect on such matters, though - it was time to start correcting.

Impressions from the exam hall. (Source: IMO 2025)

After a delightful reunion with Julia and Valentin (and jumping into the arms of Arnaud, my own former leader who now found himself on the Problem Selection Committee) we set to work correcting the kids’ papers. Marking at the IMO is quite simple in nature: the two leaders grade the students’ papers, as do a pair of neutral observers called coordinators (a mark scheme was prepared earlier by the primary leaders and coordinators whilst selecting the exam, with 7 points maximum for a perfect solution for each problem). The four of them then have a discussion (aptly called coordination) to agree on a mark. In theory, each of the four is meant to offer as objective an assessment as possible; in practice, the leaders try to push for more generous interpretations of the markscheme for their students and the coordinators are the voice of reason. Mark schemes tend to be quite objective in nature, with very clear descriptions of what specific progress points are awarded for, so the leaders’ job is a treasure hunt for the points across the small library of papers their students produce.

After a long night of correction (with some help from Valentin and Marco, who only had the one student to mark) we set off for coordination, whilst the kids went on an excursion to sample the delights of Australia Zoo. 

Source: via Tanish Patil

Our first coordination was Problem 1, where we quickly agreed on full marks for everyone except one student, where we pushed for a near-perfect solution but it quickly became clear that the coordinators would not play ball. We agreed to postpone and reconvene later, which is quite common over the course of coordination. Sometimes, when the parties can’t come to an agreement, the matter has to be escalated all the way to the other leaders of countries, but this is quite rare since typically there are a lot of inputs and assessments from other coordinators before this point to help smooth things out and agree on a sensible score. The day continued in this manner, with many scores being agreed on immediately and some others being quite contentious. Meanwhile, the kids were watching kangaroos fight in the hotel, no joke. Our rooms were quite strategically located in the middle of nature.

Excursion to a theme park. (Source: IMO 2025)

We snagged some unbelievable marks with sales performances worthy of selling sheep to Australians, and ran into roadblocks in other cases. Coordination lasts two days, so we kept at it the next day, slowly wearing down coordinators and presenting our difficult cases as clearly and objectively as possible. Finally, at 4pm on the second day, we were done. Jovian would get 35 points and join the big group on five solves, Andrej stole 30, Hongjia received 28, Eric and Francesc obtained 22 and Emil a respectable 8. We expected Jovian to be close to gold and Hongjia and Andrej to be borderline silvers, with Eric and Francesc at safe bronze scores, but thresholds would not be confirmed until a final meeting of the leaders after all scores were settled. 

While IPO banned flags, Tanish donned a Swiss flag even during meetings. (Source: via Tanish Patil)

At this point, I found my dear Estonian friend Artur and we began celebratory drinks (Marco, Valentin and Arnaud were all stuck in coordination). The cutoff meeting got pushed further and further back because of delayed discussions, and started promptly two hours late. 

After dragging our feet through six escalated cases (unsurprisingly, in all six cases the leaders sided with what the coordinators recommended) we got to vote on medal cuts. To nobody’s surprise, the huge amount of people with 35 points meant we either had to have 28 gold medals, or 72 of them (the ideal number was a bit more than 50). Whilst having 20 extra gold medals was not ideal, giving only 30 of them was way too harsh, so we erred on the side of generosity. The knock-on effect was more silvers and more bronzes, to make the proportions look somewhat tolerable. Everybody profits! And to our delight, this set silver at 28, meaning both Hongjia and Jovian benefitted from being right at the boundary. Francesc and Eric turned out to be well above the bronze cut of 19 points.

Source: via Tanish Patil

More drinks were in order to celebrate yet another Swiss record-breaking performance. I actually went back to my bedroom at a sensible time by courtesy of the Italian deputy (a good friend of mine from EPFL, Veronica) making sure us deputies were sensible and marching me and Santiago from Colombia back to our hotel and leaving the other leaders to their excesses. It appeared the students were also in a festive mood, as Marco told me there was random knocking on our door at around 4 in the morning.

Who said mathematicians don't know how to party? (Source: IMO 2025)

Finally, the last day consisted of plenty of medals at the closing ceremony, and Arnaud being chased around by Google. 

Arnaud from Switzerland handing over medals as member of the Problem Selection Committee. (Source: IMO 2025)

Jovian on stage with the other gold medalists. (Source: IMO 2025)

Hongjia in the audience. (Source: IMO 2025)

Much talking and fraternizing ensued until the early hours of the morning. As always, after an IMO everyone gets a bout of depressiveness after saying goodbye to new and old friends, but it’ll come to pass. The IMO, and Science Olympiads in general, are a truly unique experience. Nowhere else do you get to meet like-minded peers from around the country and the world in an environment with no judgement and a total appreciation for the beauty of the science you are pursuing. The spirit of competition is dwarfed by the camaraderie between this wonderfully diverse, jovial, kind and thoughtful bunch. 

Source: via Tanish Patil

If you should ever find yourself feeling a bit doubtful or morose about the future, pop by a Science Olympiad near you. The joy these young people take in the pursuit of knowledge and excellence leaves me with no doubt that we are in safe hands for many years to come. That isn’t to say the kids not doing Science Olympiads have me any less confident - but if I’m being honest with you, every kid should be doing a Science Olympiad. It’s simply a question of figuring out what clicks with you - but from the stars to the seas, there’s something in science for everyone. 
 

This concludes our journey through the Science Olympiad year 2024/2025 - but wait! A bonus article about life after Science Olympiads is coming soon, featuring our partner organisations Swiss Youth in Science and the Swiss Study Foundation. And of course, the new Science Olympiad year 2025/2026 has only just begun. In September, interested students can participate in the first rounds of maths and philosophy on OlyPortal. Looking for another discipline? As Tanish wrote, there is something for everyone among the 11 Science Olympiads. Subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Instagram or LinkedIn so you don’t miss anything.