IOL Dublin 2017: Finished!

I recently came back from the International Linguistics Olympiad, held in Dublin, Ireland at Dublin City University. Needless to say, it was a whirlwind of an experience.

The USA and Canada teams spent our first few days together at MIT, where we got to know each other better and trained. We did team practices and listened to various lectures about linguistics, which were really interesting!

Then, we were off to Dublin! We spent about a week there, but the time felt so short because of how jam packed our schedules were.

The first day was the Opening Ceremony, where participants were introduced to all the other teams from the 30+ countries being represented in the room. Each nation's teams proudly stood up when their country was introduced (in the form of trivia relating their nation to Ireland), waving their flags proudly. Well, except for us, the USA. We somehow forgot to bring flags.

The next day was the six-hour Individual Round, which went from 9 am to 3 pm! We all worked furiously on the five problems given to us. I was so focused and nervous that I didn't eat lunch!!

Then, for a day of relaxation. We all went on a one-day excursion, visiting various places in Ireland such as the site of the Battle of the Boyne and Loughcrew. The weather was horrendous in the morning with pouring rain, but the sky cleared up to eventually show beautiful scenery with a refreshing breeze.

The next day was back to work, this time for the Team Round. It was shortened to three hours instead of four, and was an interesting problem. We were provided with 90+ emojis and about 90 descriptions of them in Indonesian, and our task was to match all of them up. But, the catch was that multiple descriptions were for one emoji, so some emojis weren't described at all. We made a lot of progress, but we did mess up two translation assumptions. Wajah tersedu-sedu 😭

Then, for the last day: Award Ceremony time!! Our US participants won 7 awards total, but unfortunately, not any team prizes. We'll do better next time! がんばって！

That night, a couple of us went out to the city of Dublin and enjoyed walking around, visiting souvenir shops, and spending time together. Later at night, we got together to play card games. It was a great way to wrap up our time together!

On Saturday, all of us parted ways. Some people were going home, some were going on the post-IOL excursions, either the two-day or the three-day. I was heading to the two-day excursion with my mom! It was the perfect relaxing experience to end my visit to Ireland and my IOL journey.

This was a general summary of my IOL experience! I'll be updating soon with more personal thoughts and discussions of the problems from the Individual Round!