As a resident who didn’t do his basic education in Switzerland, I’m constantly curious about your education system. I found a very interesting math Olympiad problem at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diaeaGGBIus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diaeaGGBIus)

Can the folks who attended schooling here share some experiences about how widespread this Olympiad culture is, and your experience? Or honestly any tidbits that you think are fun.

2 comments

  1. In my school (Gymnasium), it got really promoted by our math teacher. Though this might not be the case everywhere, but we were a natural science focused class and he was extremly passionate about this. People from my school (and my class) even got to participate in the national Olympiad finale. I’d say, most people at my school at least knew of it. But still, participation was limited to a small group of motivated, mostly natural science students.

    If I’m not mistaken then we had firstly a small handout to everyone intrested, which you could give back to the teacher. If you were good enough, they let you participate in an internal qualification (only our school), then regional qualification and if you qualified there too, to the national finale.

    Edit: Btw. we looked at this exact problem with our math teacher too. He sometimes let us work on former olympiad questions. I just mention it to show how passionate he is about all of that.

  2. It’s not as big culturally as it is elsewhere, and it depends vastly on which school you go to. Some schools encourage it a lot, others not at all. Or it can even depend on individual teachers.

    HOWEVER it will definitely get bigger and better because we are working on it! We are actually are one of the only countries where all Science Olympiads in all subjects (there are 9 besides math) are united under *one association*: [https://science.olympiad.ch/](https://science.olympiad.ch/) It’s a really unique, interdisciplinary community of 5000 participants a year, almost 400 volunteers, thousands of alumni… If you want to get involved in any way or learn more, DM me, I’m active and know all the Olympiads fairly well 😀

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