Participating at the European Physics Olympiad 2024

I have just arrived back home from my first participation at the European Physics Olympiad (EuPhO) 2024. The competition took place in Kutaisi, Georgia, and lasted for 5 days. The competition was very challenging, but I got to meet a lot of awesome people and had a lot of fun.

All because of a technical error

When I started last august with the Swiss Physics Olympiad, I never thought that I would make it to the EuPhO. In fact, when I first received my score from the First Round, I was one point short of qualifying for the Second Round. However, there was some mistake in the grading, and because of that I had exactly the right score to qualify. I'm quite sure the cutoff score would have been higher if the grading had been correct in the first place and I would not even have made it to the Second Round. Afterwards, in both the Second and Final Round, I was one of the best students and was selected to represent Switzerland at the EuPhO. (Theoretically I would have qualified for the International Physics Olympiad, however as it took place in Iran this year, the Swiss team decided not to participate.)

My experience at the EuPhO

The competition itself was very challenging. Especially the experimental part was difficult for me, mostly because I was missing one key idea to solve the problem. The theoretical part was also very challenging, but I think I did quite well for my knowledge level. The problems were interesting in my opinion, except the second one, which was about spaceships moving at relativistic speeds. I think the problem was too random and did not encourage creativity. The other problems were very nice and I enjoyed trying to solve them. In the end, I was super happy to win a bronze medal.

The people

Of course, the competition was super cool, but by far the best thing was meeting other people from diffrent countries. I met a lot of awesome people and managed to trade diffrent currencies with them. I also got to know many people who will go on to study physics at the university I will go to next year.

The food

By far the coolest thing about Georgia has to be the food. It is super delicious and I loved it. 10/10 would recommend.