Back From Paris

Hey guys! I’m now back in Cambridge after four eventful days in Paris. They’re worth it, though, so I’m not complaining. If you don’t have a clue on why I was there, well... the short story is that Cambridge won the UK level of the L’Oreal Ingenius competition, an engineering competition with energy efficiency as its theme; and hence the Cambridge team (three chemical engineers including myself) represented the UK in the International Finals which was held last Wednesday until Friday.

We arrived in Paris on Tuesday and stayed in the Holiday Inn Hotel, where I found that the price per night is around €130, equivalent to £100 and almost about the price of a May Ball. Not that I’m paying for it, but I’m still astounded on how much is spent on bringing us here, not to mention all the food they’ve been feeding us. I remember stuffing myself with sushi for lunch, and tasting the best apple juice in my life sometime on Thursday night, and eating a lot of other tasty food as well.

Anyway, back to something more relevant, they were 11 teams in total: us, Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil, Belgium, France, Spain, Poland, China and India. Germany was supposed to be there as well but for some reason they dropped out. On Wednesday, which for me is the most enjoyable day in the whole program, all of us were split up and put into groups. We then went on a team-building rally/some kind of treasure hunt around Paris where we went around locating places with GPS, singing to a person with a cowboy hat in French, playing petanque, looking for lions, having a rendezvous with a skeleton, among other things. For me, the reason why it was so fun was that we have all sorts of people in the group and we all get to mingle and know each other and do stuff together, something that for some reason was missing in the UK level. I found that my thought was also shared by other members of the group, and one of them (from Poland) remarked that it’s so amazing how now you can meet all sorts of people of different nationalities compared to a few decades ago where this is highly unlikely.

The main event was on Thursday, when we presented our solutions to a panel of judges. To cut to the chase, I’ll just say that we lost. However, in our defence I should probably mention that this is the first year that the UK has entered and things might have been different otherwise. Regardless, all the teams have performed very well and shown a high standard (it is an international competition after all) and hence, any one of them could have won. The winner of the day was the Canadian team and they grabbed a €10,000 worth of a trip to a city of choice.

Well, that’s the long and short of it. I had a really enjoyable time there and despite not winning, it really is worth all the effort that we put into it. To tell the truth, it’s not really the competition itself but the people we met that makes the whole thing so memorable. Like one of my team member said on the train journey back, she missed them already.

Yaz.

P.S. Just one thing that marred the experience: I lost my phone. And this is the first time ever that I lost my phone too. Oh well.