Every year, EAG London tends to be held in May/early June. In the UK, >90% of your degree comes from performance on final exams. These take place from May to June, and the norm is to study for at least a month. This means many talented UK undergraduates might not attend EAG London because they are too busy studying. Since travel is no longer reimbursed for the USA EAGs from the UK, this means that many talented undergraduates at UK schools cannot attend any EAGs.
For example, I currently attend Oxford, and think >30% of the most dedicated undergraduates here do not attend for exam reasons.
I'm pointing this out as I'm hoping this factor is considered when deciding dates in the future.
Hi Oliver — thanks for the feedback! I agree with your general point here but want to flag a couple things on our end:
What if you just pushed it back one month - to late June?
Open to it for 2025, though looks like at least Oxford will still have exams then (exams often stretch until 1–2 weeks after the end of term). But early July might work and we can look into what dates we can get when we start booking.
Ok, this makes a lot of sense! I wasn't sure if it was even a consideration.
However, why not the US in May/June? My impression was that finals hold a lot less weight there than in the UK, and the US academic system weighs grades a lot less in general. People care a lot about exams in the UK.
It's possible we should move the US event to May/June, though it's not obvious to me that that's the best move as finals still do have some weight there — I know it's less than the UK but I don't know that people's behavior is going to shift that much if an exam season is worth 50% of their grade vs 100%.
The US also has more potential attendees in general than the UK, which I think counts for something here. There are also just other downsides to shifting our conference schedule around too much, and most of our attendees aren't students anyway.
Ah, I did not realize the US ones are larger, this also makes sense.
I think my final skepticism is that US schools end much earlier than UK schools. I don't think they have finals in late May/early June (except maybe Stanford?). So I'm skeptical that there isn't a way to do this so that all final exams are avoided?
In Canada my final exams finished in April
A side consideration - assuming a UK-based EAGx is being planned for next year, perhaps that could be planned to co-incide with holidays from UK univerisites, and perhaps be more favourable from applications from students who wanted to attend/apply to EAG London 2024 but didn't for the reason Oliver states?
[ aside: I know organising events isn't an easy thing, just want to make it clear this is more of a consideration rather than a demand :) ]
Yes, this is the plan for any potential UK EAGx (though it's not yet confirmed). Other considerations include:
This means that the spring break is currently our best guess, and as early as possible in that window so as to be further from exams.
The event is already designed to be maximally favourable to UK students so they wouldn't need to flag this.
[I help run EAGx]