IYPT 2024 — Day 0: Arrival in Budapest

Central and Eastern Europe had always been a gap on my personal map. I had spent years reading its writers — Kafka, Kundera — and listening to its metal bands, so when an IYPT juror slot opened I found myself a perfectly legitimate excuse and signed up.

IYPT is one of the seven MIT-recognised major STEM competitions. Having already served as a judge at STS and ISEF, I had been collecting the set; with Google's competition now discontinued, completing the full roster in the near term looks unlikely. But Budapest was a start.

Arrival

I landed on July 10th. Staff were waiting at the airport with folding tables and chairs — a proper welcome desk — and issued everyone a badge that allegedly doubled as a free public transport pass. I decided to test this immediately.

Over the next hour I rode the bus, the metro, and the tram, crossing the Danube by each means available, before eventually reaching the university to register. Whether anyone would ever actually check the badge was unclear; nobody seemed to. A taxi, I was told later, would have cost under 20 euros.

The Venue

The host institutions are the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and Eötvös Loránd University. The two seem to share a campus, and after a day I still had not worked out exactly where one ended and the other began. Both are among Hungary's best universities. The setting — beside the Danube, with the bridges overhead — is genuinely beautiful. The food at the first dinner was, by near-universal consensus, dreadful.

Juror Orientation

After dinner, jurors gathered for a briefing on this year's rules and scoring rubric. The main change from previous years: student work would circulate internally so teams could learn from one another. Everything else aligned with what I had heard about the competition beforehand.

The IYPT format is genuinely unusual. Rounds are called fights. Within each fight, teams rotate through three roles: Reporter (presenting their own solution to a problem), Opponent (challenging the Reporter's work), and Reviewer (evaluating both the report and the opposition). It is something like a structured physics debate. I had supervised students through the format before but had not judged it from the inside; that part of my education would continue over the following days.

The First Evening

After the briefing I walked along the Danube back to the hotel. One of the Australian jurors was good company, with strong opinions about snakes, mice, koalas, and kangaroos in roughly that order. We watched England eliminate the Netherlands in the UEFA European Championship via a late winner, declared the evening a success, and went to bed.