First-Come-First-Serve-By-Country Selection Procedure (to secure one of the 50 available spaces)
The basic concept of the 2024 selection process is to use time-of-application as the principal factor.
- Alumni should apply via this Google Form, and their priority is based upon the absolute value of the number of seconds between their time of submission and 00:00 UTC on June 6, 2024.
- Submissions received by June 13, 2024 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 absolute value of the number of seconds between their time of submission and 00:00 UTC on June 6, 2024.
- The first 50 alumni according to this rule will be notified by 00:00 UTC on June 14, 2024, which will serve as confirmation that they have a space, as long as by 00:00 UTC on June 21, 2024 both (1) their country’s current Team Leader emails imo@poshenloh.com to confirm that they will take responsibility for the actions of the alumnus in the same way that they would for the rest of their national delegation (because there are children at the IMO), and (2) the alumnus pays the fee.
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 2024 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 confirm a space after being selected via the selection procedure, the alumni must contact their 2024 IMO Team Leader. Then, their team leader must email imo@poshenloh.com, cc’ing the alumnus, supporting the registration, and specifying whether the alumnus will already be at IMO 2024 in an official role. 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.
- Based upon all responses received in the Google Form by June 13, 2024 at 00:00 UTC, the 50 slots 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.
- If there are still slots available, remaining slots will be prioritized purely on the basis of receipt time.
- When a request is reviewed, the alumni participant is notified via email, and has a 1-week window to make a non-refundable payment of all 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.
- Note that the first alumni from each of the first 50 countries to register, will be automatically selected by this algorithm. We may already start sending the approvals as early as June 10, 2024, 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 (2025 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.