week 00 - season ends + goals

soooo a bit of context for future reference - this blog takes its beginnings one day after competition season concludes, with usapho results. honestly it is going to be a pretty negative space for the foreseeable short term future but that's fine i guess cause everyone i see on a daily basis is so stressed...

so ive been thinking about making a blog for a while now but never really acted upon it. i guess this is like a pattern with a lot of things i try to do that eventually i dont follow through with, and its kind of sad and i should try to change that. but the main idea was to separate posts into tractable sections that may or may not contain more or less content every week.

• Interjection: i had originally thought about putting this blog on my profile but after seeing how many people have joined mutorials via my profile (i havent the slightest clue who many of them are) im kind of scared of randos. maybe i will think about doing that some time later or never

in terms of the organisation of posting, it will be pretty loose but im sure ill be posting relatively often (probably more than once a week especially during ib testing season) for at least the next month

i think then its appropriate for me to kind of look back at the entire comp season and review the lowlights and highlights cause it has been nagging in the back of my mind that i havent really had any highs that i could cling on to.

i think at the beginning of the school year i set upon grinding physoly basically exclusively and that was, in hindsight, a major misstep due to the lack of a fallback in case that fell through; because i kind of stopped grinding chemistry and coding olys for phys, and didn't put any effort into looking at research stuffs.

early in the season ofc we had aime qual and to my surprise amc 12 honor roll cause i didn't study compmath at all for the past 2-3 years. besides that, i guess i'll also include scibowl and scioly tryouts, especially cause during scibowl tryouts i was the most tense i had been probably the entire year--the mentality with which i approached scibowl offline is something that would come back to haunt me later

if i were to include non-official competitions, i would say that physics brawl was a pretty huge disaster even though we were still top 20 in our division--but me personally i was quite braindead after taking a physics test and joining an hour late; i in fact did not solve a single problem after #20 and i guess that was a first wakeup call for me that slowing down the grind after summer was not the strat

moving on, in january it was prime scibowl/scioly season and i was quite happy with how nisky went, despite how terribly scuffed the questions were; and i was pretty disillusioned by our scioly results, being so far back from tesla. also, f=ma was coming up soon and i begun grinding through blue morin as the semester ended

i thought i did terrible on the f=ma because i sillied so many (3) questions but really it was fine; also i am still pretty mad at usaaao for trolling their qualifiers :(

then i grinded quite a bit for scibowl regs but i think scrimming a lot was not the strat because our mentality offline was so much different, coupled with the fact that none of us had quite enough speed meant that us being eliminated was no surprise, although it hit just as terrible

into early march we celebrated a strong performance edging bothell at scioly regs and i was quite happy with my personal results (2x p1, 1x p2) but once again tesla were as dominant as red bull...... i also spent basically the entire week after that grinding out my math, physics, and history IAs, and only after that was i able to fully focus on usapho preparation. i basically finished morin blue and relativistic kinematics in two weeks, but i stopped doing more relativity because i thought there was simply too much relativity on 2023 that there wont be any this year....guess what b1 was on lol.

either way that was a whole shitshow cause guess what there was no full mech on usapho except for like a grav q that morphed into thermo and a thermo q that morphed into shm. oh well...

re: usapho - i really really thought i was cooking on a1 and b1 and indeed i was 50% right. i think my a1 kind of carried to bronze because i messed up b2 soooo hard (basically did a taylor series sub wrong...rip math); also olympiad optics is just kind of hopeless i guess...it's like too much problem solving skill involved and i dont know where to get the optics intuition because hrk is so shallow in that regard. not doing knzhou handouts was probably more of a misstep than i thought lolol. ALSO i am somewhat confused how the other two people got bronze but whatever

re: oly results - i think like the fact that so many people i know have enjoyed some highlights of success makes me want to like be like them which is good but also i am older than most of them so i kind of am not sure where that step is...this is applicable also to nats

re: post-season - playing at dast was really an experience from the fantasies and i really enjoyed doing bowl again with the newfound lack of pressure on myself as a player. also, watching the nats spreadsheet was interesting and certainly doing predictions with the gc was funny :)

otherwise looking to next year:

i think the focus obviously first and foremost is collegeapps, but also before that i should think about landing a meaningful research position somewhere...

otherwise in terms of like ideal colleges i really really want to go to cali somewhere and rn my dream schools are stanford/caltech/ucb/ucla with that in mind...i would 100% choose them over any east coast school except for cmu/mit probably

regarding my competitive pursuits, my thoughts have mostly been centred around three things - physics, chemistry, and coding. the former cause my already existent background and time commitment as well as the fun i get from grinding it; the middle cause it has always appealed to me but ive never had the time to explore it--also cause camp feels like a more realistic prospect than physics; and the latter cause what i learn will certainly be applicable in my future...

anyways, i still haven't really figured out what specific goals i want to pursue next year and this post is getting pretty long already. for now though here's what's coming up:

• math paper 3 - monday

• history - tuesday

• apcs - wedn

• english paper 1 - thur

• english paper 2 - fri

• french paper 1 reading - nextnext thur

• french paper 2 listening - nextnext fri

• mnsbt - nextnext sat

later!

EDIT 5 May:

I have thought about it a lil bit and think I should include the following sections in the blog:

1. scibowl

2. phys oly

3. other olympiads

4. scioly

5. taylor

6. f1

7. other sports

8. ib

9. other school stuffs / clubs

10. college stuffs ?

11. games

I don't think every section will receive weekly updates but they will exist surely