Challenge@Home – The Social Distancing Edition

This is how the message of the organizing committee to inform our community began. It was March 3rd, shortly after the Swiss Federal Council announced its decision to cancel all events with more than 1000 participants nationwide and thus still in the early days of the pandemic. Up to this point, it seemed like this year everything would go smoothly. The event was sold out in record time and everybody was looking forward to our annual reunion on the slopes and busy preparing their costumes for the traditional costume party.

Now instead, we faced a completely new situation. For the first time in its history, our beloved gathering could not take place. Every year since 1992 students of ETH Zurich and EPFL have met somewhere in the Swiss Alps for a friendly ski, sport and fun competition: Challenge EPFL-ETHZ (in short: Challenge).
The goal of Challenge is to bridge the Röstigraben and connect the two schools. The event has grown substantially from its humble beginnings, when it was sometimes difficult to fill the 50 slots per school for participants. Now there are selection events at both schools, and there are usually 200-300 students competing to become one of 50 Challengers for their school. It has become a tradition that many Alumni return to the event every year, to cheer on the new Challengers during the competitions and to catch up with friends from student days. Over the years this has led to a tightly knit community with many friendships lasting a lifetime. With more than 350 Challengers, Alumni, Staff, PhD students, Professors, officials and Committee members, Challenge is by now the biggest annual gathering connecting ETHZ and EPFL. Alternating between the schools, the four-day event is organized by a committee of 16 students working for a whole year on a voluntary basis. Year by year, the members of the committee collectively invest thousands of hours of work and all their heart to create a unique event, with the support of 40-50 staff.

When I heard that Challenge was cancelled, my first thoughts were with the committee, whose year-long organization efforts were wiped out in an instance. So, as you can imagine, just putting a cross over this important yearly event would not be easy for any of us in the Challenge community. The early decision by the schools left us enough time to come up with an alternative that would allow us to enjoy spending time with our community while maintaining adequate social distancing. In its usual style, a stream of creative ideas erupted from the Challenge community and, eventually, the plan for a Challenge@home was born.

In the week leading up to the would-be Challenge weekend of March 26-29, Alumni and students shared pictures of their home office setups together with often very personal updates about what was happening in their lives. Some are still studying, others working in research, most in industry and a few even running their own companies –sponsoring Challenge every year–, some are travelling the world, and some raising kids. Even quite a few of the older generation who stopped coming to the event years ago, participated, sharing their personal journey since their Challenge days.
In addition to the individual updates inside the community, there was news to share from the organizational side: despite the difficult circumstances, Challenge kept evolving. Instigated by Challenge, the two student organizations of EPFL and ETH Zurich, AGEPoly and VSETH, signed their first official partnership contract in the beginning of this year. This partnership contract simplifies and thus enables further collaborations between students of ETHZ and EPFL, which contributes to the main goal of Challenge.

Then, in the middle of the weekend, we got a call back to reality in our group chat: “Sorry to interrupt the Challenge party mood, but I have a bit of a serious question for anyone still at EPFL: have you heard of any labs trying to develop ventilators for the hospitals? I’m doing it with a team at ETH Zurich coordinated with the University Hospital in Zurich, and we want to make sure we don’t do things double.”
The response was a beautiful display of what makes the Challenge family so special: the ability to immediatly switch from party-fun-mode to our serious day-job-selves. The community was able to quickly provide a couple of useful contacts both in industry and at EPFL.Then the work was done and everyone got into a festive mood once more for the gala evening on Saturday night, which came with a special contribution from Rector Prof. Sarah Springman and also a contribution from Prof. Martin Vetterli, the President of EPFL. These four days almost felt like a real Challenge. But nonetheless, without the Challengers, the competitions, the hugs, and the songs, something was missing.

It was special to share this (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime experience with my Challenge family and it makes me genuinely proud to be a part of it. We will certainly need a lot of optimism and positivity to get through this crisis and the fall-out that is yet to come. The positive vibes coming from this community all year round, and especially in this difficult time, help to keep me going. After this Challenge@home, I'm even more excited to hopefully see everyone at the Summer Challenge in August, with double the energy after a long period of relative isolation.

Finally, a special shout out to Committee 2020 who have had to do twice the work. Keep your spirits up, we all appreciate your efforts!

Claudio Paganini:
I was a participant competing for ETH Zurich in 2010 and have returned to the event every year since, including as a member of the committee in 2012. Since 2015 I have helped Patrick Frigg at Challenge Alumni ETH Zurich mostly by supporting the current organizing committee with advice where needed. In particular, I guided the process of the renewal of the Challenge Charta for four years, until its signing in January 2019. The Charta is the foundational agreement between EPFL, ETH Zurich, EPFL Alumni, ETH Zurich Alumni, VSETH, AGEPoly, Challenge ZH and Challenge LS, on which the event is based. Education: BSc/MSc Physics ETH Zurich, then PhD in Mathematics University of Potsdam/Albert Einstein Institute, then Research Fellow at Monash University and now on an Early Mobility grant funded by the SNSF in Regensburg but living in Berlin.