First things first: BIG congratulations to our first ever 360 swimmers! Our team has been busy setting everything up for the Piscines and we are beyond excited to receive you at the school this Summer.
About the registration process
All Piscine spots were booked in a matter of seconds. While we are happy about the amount of interest in Hive, we recognize that there are many applicants who did not get a spot yesterday and are feeling very frustrated. Please know that we hear you and we agree that there is room for improvement.
Our admissions process is very new and different from what most people are used to and this is our first time organizing it in Finland. When we first opened our applications, we did not know what to expect: how many people would apply, how many check-ins we would need to organize and how many people would actually want a spot in this Summer’s Piscines. For this first year, we used statistics and patterns we were seeing in our partner schools, to inform how to plan our own process. One of these patterns was that many people tend to drop or postpone moving forward with their application already after the check-in.
What we are seeing now is that we underestimated the interest in Hive and how many people would want to attend a Piscine already this first year. Moving forward, we will try and figure out ways to balance this interest with the reality that there are only a limited amount of Piscine spots. It is not an easy task, but we are now much more knowledgeable about what this process looks like at Hive Helsinki.
First come first served - why?
We have been asked why we won’t make the first phase test harder, why we can’t pause the applications, or add some other measures which would somehow control the “quality” of our applicants and reduce the amount of applicants trying to enroll to the Piscines. While this might feel tempting, the reality is that the Selection Piscine is ultimately our only way for evaluating whether a candidate fits within our program or not and adding any additional criteria would be arbitrary.
The Piscine registration does not require skills or even aim to evaluate our candidates skills: our main goal there is to try and make the process as equal as possible, which is why we fill the Piscines on a first come first served basis. It might feel a bit random, but it is the fairest way we could think of. We will stick with this mechanism in the future, too. We will, however, organize fewer check-ins moving forward, to help deal with the current bottleneck.
Will there be a waiting list?
We do not have plans to have a waiting list at this moment, but we are thinking about how to ensure the process is fair to people who may have been waiting longer than others. We don’t have a solution to this yet, but we are thinking about this.
When is the next Piscine?
We will organize more Piscines in the future, next one being in February of 2020. We will store test results in our system for three years and applicants can choose to move forward with their application anytime during that timeframe without having to redo the first phase test.
Thank you for the feedback and congratulations once more to all the swimmers!