First-Come-First-Serve-By-Country Selection Procedure (to secure one of the 30 available spaces)
The basic concept of the 2023 selection process is to use time-of-application as the principal factor.
- Alumni should ask their country’s current Team Leader to email imo@poshenloh.com to register their interest.
- Applications received by June 1, 2023 at 00:00 UTC will be processed in lexicographical increasing order based upon the ordered pair (N, T), where N is the index of the application with respect to its origin country (e.g., the 3rd application from USA has N = 3), and T is the timestamp of receipt.
- Spaces are still available (after June 1). So, anyone who wishes to apply still can, on a first-come-first-served basis.
Full details:
- Each alumni participant must be officially approved by their original country’s Team Leader, who agrees to take responsibility for the alumni. Team Leaders are free to choose not to do this, in which case their country will not have any alumni approved for participation. This is similar to the situation with IMO Observers, except that alumni are only coming for the last 2 days of the IMO. If their original country is no longer in existence, then they will need the approval of another country’s Team Leader, which is most reasonably related to their original IMO participation. In ambiguous cases, the 2023 IMO Alumni Reunion organizer (Po-Shen Loh) will be responsible for the decision on which country counts. For this first year, only IMO contestant alumni are eligible. (In future years, the scope of “alumni” will be expanded to include other IMO roles.)
- In order to register interest, the alumni must contact their imo-official.org 2023 IMO Team Leader. Then, their team leader must email imo@poshenloh.com, cc’ing the alumnus, supporting the registration of interest, and specifying whether the alumnus will already be at IMO 2023 in an official role (to determine whether the alumnus counts against the limit of 30 not-yet-at-IMO participants). If the team leader is a former IMO contestant and wants to join, they can simply send an email to imo@poshenloh.com stating their intention to join themself.
- At the same time, alumni are encouraged to also register their interest on this Google Form (https://forms.gle/Woqhh7UVxgsiBU5e6) so that we know they are waiting for their team leader to write to us. However, we use the team leader’s message as the official timestamp, not this Google Form response.
- Based upon all responses received by June 1, 2023 at 00:00 UTC, the 30 slots for not-already-at-IMO-2023 alumni will be filled by going through the requests in order of receipt time, with the modification that if there are multiple requests from the same country, then the 2nd request is only reviewed after all 1st requests have been processed for all countries. Similarly, the 3rd request from a country is only reviewed after all 2nd requests have been processed from all countries, etc.
- When a request is reviewed, the alumni participant is notified via email, and has a 1-week window to make a non-refundable deposit of all required fees.. If they miss their window, their position in the queue is moved to the back, as if their original request submission time was the time that they were invited to make their deposit.
- A similar selection process is used to determine which additional alumni (already officially at IMO 2023) attend the post-IMO portion.
- Note that the first alumni from each of the first 30 countries to have their team leaders send a message, will be automatically selected by this algorithm. We may already start sending the deposit requests as early as May 16, 2023, so that approved alumni can book their international travel at economical prices.
- There is an exception for alumni to instantly jump the queue: if they donate at least US$250,000 this year to the IMO Foundation to support future IMO’s (2024 or later). In that case, they also do not count against any country limit in the aforementioned selection process. This also counts if they exercise their decision-making power to cause a company to donate that amount.