Raleway wrote:Gonna be a spicy hot take here;
This being my last year competing (therefore my last MIT invitational) and having competed at many of the other top competitions such as Princeton and SOUP, I strongly disliked MIT. I competed here last year and also disliked it, but this year I felt was much worse. I competed in the last block of Sounds of Music - and I waited 50 minutes in line to have to do my 5 minute build portion. Having to stand in the hallway with your instrument and people walking by with everything going on is terrible. Luckily, my other build portions went early on in the day and were able to finish right on time - big props to the Wright Stuff event supervisors that I know are great at what they do based on personal experience. Despite this, I definitely feel the flying arena was poor and strongly conducive to inherent disadvantages, but nothing on the event supervisors since the picking of the arena is fully on the MIT organizers.
It's not just that, but knowing that my Fermi exam was scored incorrectly as well as my Codebusters exam (after only glancing through it for about 30 minutes on our long bus ride home) really irks me. One was in my favor, but I strongly dislike any error in grading, albeit understanding the time crunch. My team also mentioned how in Thermodynamics two teams were even handed out the answer key... and those two teams mentioned it only 5 minutes after they got it. Completely unacceptable in more ways than one. Not just that, each team in that first period for that event was at a disadvantage for only having 30 minutes rather than 50 minutes because of issues.
It is simply my opinion that an invitational that is run smoothly and simply is the best. All these small irking issues pile up and really create an uncomfortable invitational. In attending PUSO and SOUP, I felt each one was better run than MIT - especially PUSO. It's simple, is exactly what it says it is, and we actually got a homeroom that was a "room" with a men's bathroom on the same floor. SOUP has a slightly confusing format to its campus but not as bad as MIT. Despite this, they had volunteers in the cold directing people and answering questions to keep competitors in the right place.
I appreciate that MIT tried to expand its team list and number, but inevitably, there comes a point that it is infeasible. Here, that's what happened. I hope each following invitational can read the feedback and apply it so the same mistakes do not happen again. Many teams travel long distances and put up with pretty bad complications to compete, and it's just very disheartening to see mistakes that are avoidable. Congratulations to our Mason 2.0 from MIT this year and everyone who competed!
*My opinion simply represents my own opinion given my experience and thoughts*
Long
rant (emphasis on the fact that it is a 3 a.m. rant) coming, brace yourselves.
I'll just put my (more than) two cents in here as one of the supervisors, but sure, the constructive criticism helps, but there are so many things that as a competitor, you don't see why those things are the way they are until you actually become an event supervisor or a tournament director yourself. And some of those biggest things involve scoring, rooms, and manpower, and many times, things competitors complain about are things that may not necessarily completely be in tournament executives' control.
First, volunteers. Getting them is hard. I know because I'm in charge of volunteer management for my university's own regional tournament. I literally blast out our volunteer form link EVERYWHERE (my own social media, our Facebook page, multiple Facebook groups, multiple Groupme chats, etc) and I even bother our people to also broadcast the form as much as they can multiple times and I still am not sure I have gotten as much personnel as I would have ideally wanted to be there. But I do know why - when you hit college, it can be tough to give up that much of your time. I remember being severely burnt out from doing so much tournament traveling last year, I can say some of my grades did take a slight hit from the overall exhaustion and constantly working on nothing but SciOly in whatever free time I could squeeze out between classes, homework, projects, and other things college throws at ya. While general volunteers aren't always involved to this extent, many of them still prioritize other things over helping out, even with bribes of free food and free T-shirts (which is decently effective), which is entirely understandable because
we are students first. I would say that getting volunteers for us can be a bit easier than for MIT, since our tournament is during school when people are here and MIT's is during IAP while school isn't in session, which makes it harder to recruit volunteers anyways since many students aren't on campus at the time, including members of the planning committee. But if they didn't do it then, there's no way it would be possible to host the tournament in the first place. The fact that they can get as many volunteers that they do, even ones that have never done SciOly and are just interested in helping out high schoolers passionate about science, is impressive in itself. And again, being understaffed sucks, and on top of that, we supervisors and our volunteers are not perfect human beings - we may make mistakes, and if so, we recognize that point you brought up as a valid concern and are genuinely sorry for that, but honestly, we really sacrificed a lot to be there for you and it does hurt us supervisors a little to hear words that harsh (even though I know you didn't take the event I was running) with all the effort we put in as well as the planning committee.
A second point about volunteers - sometimes they do questionable stuff without ES permission. I know what it's like to be "one of those" annoying general volunteers that tries to hard to overcorrect mistakes that ES's make because sometimes I do take on that archetype (mostly ONLY if the event is REALLY being screwed up, and I also always be sure to ask for ES permission before grading something in a way that is technically right but not in the key), but like this weekend I definitely experienced what it's like to have those kinds of volunteers, and especially ones that do have a bit of an ego clash with the supervisors. Some of our general volunteers this past weekend supposedly seemed to have thought they could grade how they saw fit and not according to the way we structured how we wanted the question to be answered in the key, and my co-supervisor and I were quite annoyed that they went rogue on us, especially since it would contribute to inconsistent grading - we ended up regrading everything we told them to not grade but they went ahead and graded anyways, which put us behind on scoring (historically I'm always one of the last people to finish grading but like....this was a whole new situation to experience on that). Sometimes volunteers really do help, but in some cases, they can hinder grading in some situations, which leads to panic and such, which is never good. We're also all human, and all humans make mistakes.
Point about rooms: sometimes it sucks, depending on the host institution's policies - that's the biggest control factor in getting rooms for any university-hosted tournament by far. As a tournament executive at my own university's regional, I can say that many of our room choices this year were not ideal at all, but some recent drastic changes to the campus policies on which rooms student organizations were even allowed to reserve really pigeon us off, but in a lot of cases, more than you think, it can generally be hard for students, especially undergraduates, to attempt to protest these kinds of policy changes. Sometimes it's almost like we're basically powerless against these kinds of circumstances, depending on the strictness of the administrators of the school. These things happen.
Wanna reemphasize, but we always tell people to keep in mind that EVERYONE (bar and miss maybe a handful of exceptions every now and then) on tournament staff for university-run competitions in general is
a volunteer. No one is getting paid for their service (unless you count travel reimbursement (which only nonlocal ESs like myself get) as "being paid"). As hard as you prepare to take our tests and rightfully have frustration if we make grading errors, you also have to think about how much time we spent tirelessly writing your tests and preparing the materials to run them (COUGH COUGH FORENSICS) almost basically for free, and then taking a whole weekend out of our busy college lives to be there for you. Many of the tournament staff members become exhausted leading up to it to make sure everything's in order, and then tournament day itself is a whole other animal for us to deal with as well. It's crazy and, as I've realized from having served from all sides of Division D (as a general volunteer, an event supervisor, and a tournament executive), something that I probably never could have seen as a competitor back in those days. While us being competitors once ourselves does give us the insight into how to improve running of tournaments once we reach that point, being on the other side definitely makes you realize that as much work as competitors put in to prepare for tournaments, a few more orders of magnitude's worth of effort goes into organizing it all. No tournament can be run perfectly. It's just impossible. On the scale that MIT did this year, I can say that it was one of the best tournaments I've ever internally been a part of. One that has definitely been run much better than several national tournaments, one definitely worth praise, and one definitely worth returning to.
These are my personal opinions and may not necessarily reflect the views of MIT Science Olympiad.