The NZPMC has finally made it to UoA, UC

The NZPMC has perhaps formed a significant portion of my university life. It is the first start-up that I built, and every year it gained success, somehow and miraculously. I thank God for leading my way through, and I reflect back on the small things that led to this stage.

I will briefly summarise what we achieved in the past 4 years:

 

2018, after MATHS 153 (Uni course I took in my last year of highschool):

My friend and I conceptualised the idea of building a physics competition for New Zealand highschool students. This was given that there was a dearth of physics competitions catered for NCEA curriculums. Both of us really would have liked to have seen that competition, and therefore we decided to build one ('NZPC' back then, but we did quickly realise that this shared acronyms with New Zealand Programming Contest and New Zealand Prostitute (...) Collective).

 

2019 (first year of university):

We almost basically gave up on the idea of building the competition. We just felt so drained trying to create questions, and I believe my friend felt he was putting more effort into the competition than I was. We did not see much vision with the competition, as there was a 100% uncertainty regarding the success of this competition. It seemed that noone really cared about our competition. We tried to reach out to the physics teachers community through Facebook group, posting a form to gather people's interest, but to only receive perhaps 3 or 4 teacher's interest through that form. Noone was really keen to market or sponsor our competition. We once visited Head of Physics at University of Auckland, where the Head of Physics basically said, I am not very interested, and I am not sure if this will really work out well. That was painful, and we sort of did not touch the competition afterwards.

 

My friend's friend also joined our team. My friend said that we should try some stuff out. I was not too sure whether I would have liked to continue or not, but there was not much reason not to try, so I gave it a go. We started building more sample questions.

 

2020 (First year of NZPMC):

We had already given up on the idea of running the competition in 2019, as we were severely underprepared. On the bright side, we had gotten a support from our former lecturer of MATHS153, Padraic Bartlett. He must have thought that what we were doing is great and wanted to see how it would turn out - so he wrote a recommendation letter for us, introducing us to Steven, who has been the Head of Mathematics department at University of Auckland. Steven agreed to sponsor us what seemed like a huge amount at the time - $500 - and printing. The founders (3 people at this point) were feeling great. Coincidentally, NZMS (New Zealand Mathematics Competition) was also almost agreeing to sponsor us, on the condition that we have someone of authority in Mathematics backing us up. Of course, that was perfect timing for us to seize the opportunity, as we have gotten a letter of recommendation from Steven too. Some time after, University of Canterbury joined in too, and they sponsored quite a generous amount for a new competition - about $1500. 

 

We kept creating questions. That took a long time to build up. The emails were piling up. I was building an email automation system with SQL, Java and Gmail API - a big achievement for a second-year student that only took a semester of Java. I was also in charge of setting up our company bank account and establishing our entity as a business entity (Limited) - that was pretty tricky, but we got through that to get sponsorship from NZMS.

 

The round took place online, with Education Perfect making the platform free for use for that year. That was pretty generous of them. We had some winners, like Tobias and Paxton, who went on to become our team in 2022. But that's another story.

 

2021 (Second year of NZPMC):

The competition was growing for sure, as we have gained almost 2x registrations in the second year of NZPMC compared to the first year (700 versus 400 registrations, I think). That said, the competition was free, so it was not like we were getting paid extra when we had more registrations. Our main aim was to gain attention from the schools and students. Also, we weren't really prepared to take payments from the students and teachers, as we weren't sure about the processes involved. Luckily, the sponsorship fund was big enough to sustain us through the year - it just meant that we were not really able to pay ourselves (which wasn't our intention in the first place, so it was fine.

 

The sponsorships were similar in this year as well. NZMS, UoA and UC continued to sponsor us. However, Education Perfect decided to charge us. What was difficult for us was that passwords for EP platform had expired frequently, which meant we had to continually reset the passwords if the students hadn't logged in. Remember, we weren't paid to do these things, which meant that our stress was skyrocketting at that point. Every student and teacher was just asking for many logistics related things. 

 

There were some technically difficult things here too. One main difficulty I had was that we had different tables for students and teachers, which meant that we had to manually check which teacher each student belonged to, by looking at school names. Since school names were entered through the free-fill form, the school names were not consistent. That's when I decided that I should build a platform for registration.

 

Email automation was becoming more manageable, as I switched to using CSVs and Python (and Gmail API in Python), which was far more easier than booting up an SQL server (used MySQL I think) and interacting with it through Java. It was still painful to compose emails (html body), and it was somewhat difficult to make sure that emails were being correctly sent (eg sending students' details to a teacher, where some student's details would be missing; updating students and teacher details on csv then making sure that the most updated csv is being used for email automation). I think I had 'registration-30.csv' file, which is the thirtieth version of the registration sheet.

 

Perhaps the main thing that happened in that year was getting another person into our team (at this point, our team is a team of 4). He was very talented academically, and we basically offloaded the task of writing junior and senior division to him - which probably was not the best move that we made. We made sure that he was compensated in the end ($1K), but I would imagine that it would have been stressful to have worked without continuous communication of expectations. This is because we didn't really have meetings here - we just communicated through Facebook messenger. We had lost him after that year, which became a strong reason that we should recruit more people into our team, balance the workload out, communicate more freuqently, and pay them appropriately. After all, what matters is that one has a sense of being part of a team and achieving something together (which was the reason that I could continue with NZPMC).

 

Conversation between the other cofounders and me was being tainted with NZPMC, and it just felt like a lot of the stuff we were talking about were NZPMC. I was fine with that, as it was not like we had other things to talk about (we were taking different specialisations, and had almost minimal interaction), and we were in fact reaching out for a common goal, so we were feeling a sense of camaraderie. 

 

Unfortunately, one of the cofounders (who joined in 2020) left, and this was understandable as NZPMC was really eating into our personal lives, and it was difficult to stay motivated and happy when we had lots of grunt tasks. The biggest thing was perhaps answering to queries from students and teachers - we would get at least 5 or 10 during the peak period, and it was definitely putting toll on us. (You would think this is an easy task, but it really isn't)

 

2022 (third year of running NZPMC):

We had a major upgrade to NZPMC this year, and this was probably the year that we had the most successes.

 

We had participations throughout the country, with over 400 participants from North Island and 200 participants from South Island. We held two rounds instead of one, where the final round was held in person at the University of Auckland and the University of Canterbury. During the competition day, we had students meeting with university clubs, hearing seminars from heads of departments, and attending various workshops. 

 

Perhaps the most interesting change is that we started charging students $12 for entry. Even more importantly, we had more effective registrations than 2021 where the competition was free. That is when I realized that, to a certain degree, the customers are expecting to pay for the service. Most competitions are around $16~20, so $12 definitely sounds like a reasonable pricing scheme for many people. I do not believe that we would have gathered as much registrations if we had kept the competition free, since that is indicating to the customers that we believe the competition is worth $0 dollars (and if we don't value our competition ourselves, noone else will believe that it is a big deal). 

 

What made it perfect timing for us is that I had a registration platform developed by then, which I developed over late 2021 till early 2022 (MERN). The platform returned a code for a registered teacher, which students would use to register themselves. This made it easy for us to generate a master sheet where we knew which school and teacher each student belonged to. This came in handy when we had to generate invoices pdf and other things. More importantly, the registration platform stored details of students and teachers on MongoDB cloud database. This allowed everyone to have the same view of the registration status - everything was up to date, and we did not manually have to process these data (unlike through google form where we did have to do that). All the team members could look at the recent database, and respond to queries. This was not possible when one person held the correct version of csv and had to answer queries alone. I also rewrote email automation, in a way that is more modular and readable. I wrote the program using python Jupyter notebook, which I might explain how I built later. 

 

We also expanded our team to 10 people, where we now had 3 cofounders (my friend joined, and he really put as much effort into this organisation as the other cofounder and me, hence we gave him the title of honorary co-founder), 6 education team members (where we had 1 lead for the junior team and 1 lead for the senior team), 1 sponsorship and outreach manager. The education team members and sponsorship manager were all participants from 2021 NZPMC who had decent success. In fact, our two education leads are both NZQA Premier scholars, which is quite awesome. We also had 2 students from NZSCC joining us as high school students, and they had done great jobs to our competition too.

 

We also had frequent meetings, where in the start we had weekly executive meetings between the cofounders and biweekly meetings with education leads. The education team managed to create practice questions (~40 per division), Round 1 questions (~40 per division), and Round 2 questions (40 for junior and 24 for senior), and we paid something a little less than $2K. This payment would not have been imaginable if we had not charged the students and relied on the sponsors, so it was a moment where we really felt the importance of being self-reliant.

 

We had a new sponsorship from Learncoach, sponsoring us with almost $3K including prizes for the students. We even got contacted by Crimson Education regarding sponsorship, even without us asking. We became a university club at UoA, which meant that we could book venues and hold the finals. We integrated our final event into the University Canterbury Engineering Department's UC Experience Day, which meant that we were able to piggyback their seminars and lunch provision, on top of a $1.5K sponsorship. To be fair, we are doing a lot of favour for them as well, as we brought in lots of people for UC experience day which they would not have been able to source otherwise. So it's a win-win.

 

Biggest achievement is perhaps:

1) being able to pay question making people, which made it feel less bad to tell people to make questions

2) having 10 people in our team, which is a growth - learnt that distribution of labour and separation of concern is important

3) getting a new cofounder into our team - he's done amazing work, participating in big decisions and providing clarity with data work

4) $12 registration fee from students - we would not have had capacity to hold finals if it weren't for financial stability

5) holding inperson finals, which was a chance to deepen the presence of NZPMC in student community, as well as building connections with other clubs, UC and UOA.

6) buying a fancy meal after NI and SI finals for NZPMC team - really boosted team morale, and gave good impressions of us to the team. Hopefully most people can stay.

 

2023 (Fourth year of running NZPMC):

I am very grateful for what has happened in the past three years with NZPMC, and I have no doubt that it will grow big in the future years. Moving forward, I would say the followings are important:

 

1) Having logistics and project manager

Cofounders really should not be in charge of delegating work and telling people what to do. Now that we have 2022 NZPMC team members who know how the competition works, it will be useful to leverage their experience so that they can act as an effective and knowledgeable middleman between cofounders (board) and the other team members.

 

2) Having a human resource manager

This can be either cofounders or the other team members. Someone needs to be in interviews, and I believe past team members that are not cofounders have more knowledge over what kind of aspects are important. We also need to filter people who really believe in the vision of our company or at least are genuinely interested in the role they are applying for. I really felt that this is quite important.

 

3) Having a final decision maker 

Debates and conflicts of opinions are necessary, but someone should be making the final decision at certain point. Some processes need to be set up so that risks and constraints can be identified for a decision, so that we can document these decisions and analyse what went well and wrong afterwards. Lots of decisions that we have to make are uncertain, and if we have a good process and reflection, we will be able to minimise risks involved with the decisions, whilst making effective decisions quickly. One way is to have someone as a final decision maker that manages debates and conflicts, whilst having the power to make that final decision.

 

4) More recruitment

Students come and go, and it's very dangerous if we have a single person with the most knowledge. We must distribute knowledge and make sure each person is specialised in their area and make sure that person is not the only person specialised in that area. 

 

5) Email confirmation

Our registration system is growing, but it does not do email confirmation or take payments. It would be nice to have some management platform too.

 

6) More reasonable pricing

$12 was arbitrary, and in a sense, it was quite cheap for the students. It would be good to take the delivery into account, and we could even consider sending a pdf certificate for the students - though... what about the badges?

I do feel that $15 is quite reasonable for round 1, and $25 is quite reasonable for round 2.

 

7) Me stepping down

I personally felt good that people were finding their way into the team and raising their voices. At certain points, I would be met with arguments opposing my points, and that is when I felt that our team was running healthy. I would like to minimise my presence in the upcoming year and have younger generations taking up the spot.