A phase I'll never forget...

 It was the night of 8th August 2021, when we had the closing ceremony of CAMP (A math camp organized by Ritam Nag, Aatman Supkar and Rohal Goyal). My eyes were a bit wet realizing that it is ending and I won't have those 3 - 4 hours of fun every night which I had the whole past week. Thinking that time about all the memories I made in the camp from joining the game nights to getting frank with my seniors, it was probably one of the best experiences I had in any of the math related thing I did. I was fascinated by the organization of this camp and was just wondering if I was good enough to ever do something like this in future, but I never really got enough courage or time to do anything like this until recently.

Fast forwarding to the time after INMO results, me and many of my friends were very sad that IMOTC has been cancelled by HBCSE and we couldn't meet each other for another year. Well, jokingly in a meet around that time, Sunaina told me to ask Rohan if they can organize something like Unofficial IMOTC 2020 or CAMP 2021 again. The next day I was going to meet Rohan but I had this thing in mind, so I looked for an opportunity and asked him if he can do so. He said me "Well, why don't you guys do it?? We did what we had to do in our time, now it's your turn!" And this actually just hit me. The same day I went home and asked Sunaina if we could organize Unofficial IMOTC 2022 with people of our age and not our seniors!! Infact for our juniors (ok I am a junior too but whatever just get the feel xD).

Sunaina asked Gunjan and Atul and the idea went into motion,
None of us had any organizational experience in the past, it was a first time for all of us. We didn't know the challenges we'd face in future and how we would tackle them. We just had a few casual meets where we discussed stuff but everything was in air. Moreover the amount we used to actually discuss was way less than the time we talked about the non-important stuffs in the meet. Then for a week the server we four made got dead. I was thinking to revive it the next day or something when I suddenly saw a message from someone (idr who..) saying what to do next? And after this point it somehow just went on and on.

We first made a list of what all we have to do and this list was like 40% of the stuff we actually did xD. This list was quite unorganized too because we all were a bit unsure of where to begin from (atleast I was ;~;). We didn't have an idea of how many instructors we should take and how many would agree. We thought to ask like somewhat 40-50ish people and thought around 15-20 of them would agree which would be very less. But actually we ended up having 38 instructors, which is quite huge of a number!! Well it might seem very good but then there were scheduling issues. We thought instructors would ideally take only 1 class and some would take only 2 because of their busy schedule, but on the contrary quite a few instructors asked for more classes as they wanted to run proper courses on it. Well this went into a bit of trouble for us because we didn't know how to fit in the classes as there were just too many of it :( We talked with rg and he suggested that in such a case, organize stuff and make few classes clash. E.g. if there are 2 college topics, then what's the need to learn both the topics (for an oly kid)? If they even learn one of them nicely it's way better!

So this issue finally got handled!

We thought to invite a few professors to give guest lectures too, but sadly most of them didn't revert us back which was kinda sad but then the good point is, I had the responsibility to reach the people mostly and ask them to take classes but since I had no experience with writings mails to professors I needed help. So I asked one of the organizers of STEMS by CMI (Aniruddhan bhaiya) and man he is so so so generous that he took out like a couple of hours and had a meet with me and told all the nice points to take care of while writing the mail and I actually now have a decent idea of how to write mails (way better than before!) So even if this plan was not successful much, I still learnt a lot out of it :)

Next was thinking about the financial area. We thought of sending graphic tablets to the instructors who didn't already have it. Expecting the number to be ~15, the amount was kinda huge (~75k rupees). We didn't know if we could get this much of amount but oh well luckily we got from the first org we asked!! We asked the monsoon math camp and they have this thing called Monsoon Math funds and since Sunaina and I were both MMC alumini they agreed to give us the funds easily :DD. Actually the number turned to be a bit less than this which was very good for us!

Well all this events didn't take place gradually as mentioned, everything was in a mess LOL but I sorted out each event just to make stuff clear.

Till here it was about how organization went and the things which we as a team did for the camp but this wasn't all :eyes:. There were a lot of arguments and fights too, yeah. That wasn't that good of an experience, but the good thing was even after those fights, we ended up being together and just went on to work for the camp. I feel maybe those fights could have been prevented but this is just speculation to be fair. It's like a part of organizing team to disagree but still maybe arguing about it more maturely is a better solution I personally feel.

Yesterday we had a meet with all the instructors, and it was the first meet which was not just organizer-only. After that meet I felt soooo happy that I can't express it. It felt the thing on which I have literally spent my whole month on is going to happen pretty soon. It's a feeling which I feel you can only experience by yourself and not when someone tells you. Now we have camp orientation on 31st of July and I am really looking forward to it. Hope that the camp runs well and things don't get delayed during the camp, let's see :) 

In the end, I would say that it might seem like that organizing a camp/exam is not that hectic of a task, but well try organizing one and you'll realize :P. Honestly I feel if you've enough people, and enough tolerance to bear the workload you should definitely go for it and organizing something on your own too! It's a pretty satisfying experience. 

I hope this post helps you know some of my experience in how the organization process went for the IMOTC, might as well post a part 2 of it after the IMOTC ends hehe.

Pranav Chohdhary!