by Harini Salgado '15 Alex Bourzutschky '14 and Mike Winer '15 were two of the five members of the team that represented the United States at the 2014 International Physics Olympiad (IPhO), which was held this year in Astana, Kazakhstan from July 13 -21. It is rare achievement for one high school to have two students on the traveling team in the same year, and the Gazette interviewed Bourzutschky and Winer in July. Around 4,277 people took the F = ma, the qualifying exam, in January this year. The top 400 scorers are named semi-finalists and then take the USA Physics Olympiad Exam. In addition to Bourzutschky and Winer, eleven other Blair students were also named semi-finalists: Daniel Amir '14, Adam Busis '15, Matthew Das Sarma '15, Alan Du '14, William Leete '14, Alex Miao '17, Bendeguz Offertaler '15, Andrew Simler '14, Victor Xu '15, Matthew Yu '16 and Richard Zhu '14. Bourzutschky and Winer were among the 19 students chosen to go to the US Physics team training camp at the University of Maryland in College Park. For Winer, it was the second year he went to the training camp. At the camp, the 19 team members attended physics lectures, did practice labs, tests and mystery labs. Outside of actual training, Bourzutschky and Winer played several games with the other finalists like Risk, Settlers of Catan, Tichu, Contact, and some card games. Bourzutschky's favorite part of attending the camp was meeting all the new people: "I think what I enjoyed most was being able to meet so many intelligent yet sane people from across the country who loved physics," he said. Bourzutschky and Winer have both been passionate about the subject of physics for several years. Winer first discovered his interest in the science in middle school: "6th grade, we had a physics unit in class. I was playing this jumping game, like Doodle Jump, and I was very bad it so I wanted to figure out how long it would take my rabbit to reach the ground so I did these incredibly complicated calculations which I am sure were wrong," Winer remembered. Bourzutschky found his love for Physics at Blair: "Coming into Blair, I definitely had more interest in math than physics. First semester freshman year, however, I picked up freshman physics extraordinarily well (I missed 3 points out of roughly 800, apart from the final). Even I found it a bit unexpected, but I realized that physics is definitely a stronger point for me than math. It's difficult to say whether Mr. Schafer was the sole catalyst, but the way he taught freshman physics definitely played a big part in getting me interested," he said. Both of them spent hours outside of school reading more and more about physics and joined Blair's physics team, which they were co-captains of last year. On the days that weren't filled with the competition, the participants got to travel around Astana. "It was actually a really nice city I have to say," Winer said. They went on 5 outings to places in the city: to the National Museum of the Republic, the Schoolchildren's Palace, the Astana-Bayterek, which Winer enjoyed visiting, and up the diagonal elevator in the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation. They also travelled an hour North to the Hotel Rixos. There they got to see the traditional dress, music and dance as well as several other parts of Kazakhstan's culture. Bourzutschky really liked visiting the Khan Shatyr shopping and entertainment center: "[It's] basically a four-story mall with an arcade/amusement park on the top floor. On the inside you could see the four levels as well as palm trees throughout and on the outside there was a view through the gate of the Bayterek monument." Bourzutschky summed up his experience very fondly: "I liked that although the reason I got to go was for academic strength, that it really ended up being more of a tourist trip." When he first heard that the IPhO would be in Kazakhstan, he thought, "Kazakhstan? What is there to do in Kazakhstan?" But after coming back, he was very happy that "I got to see a very cool corner of the world that I highly doubt I'd have gotten to see." |