Well, there are better memory-triggering songs but I think this
pretty much sums up how I feel about blogging right now (possibly
including the very act of choosing that song.) And college apps. And
life. Plus, the music video is silly in its own incredible way.
Anyway. Around this time a year ago, I made
a post talking about how around
a year before that,
I paused my participation in big high-school competitions, for a variety
of reasons.
And then I rambled on life and programming competitions.
If you didn’t get it yet, this post so far has been written to
meaningfully echo the last one. Nothing so abrupt has happened this
year, but I just realized how nice it was to have a paragraph humorously
listing the weird stuff I had gotten myself into over the course of
2013, so I’m going to do so again, even more completely.
Random video! Although I feel that I’ve heard it earlier, my first
conscious memory of getting linked to it is from
this
post. At first I thought it would be the right background music for
this post, but upon further reflection I think it mainly suited me while
I was writing this post. Well, it’s topical if you mentally replace
“day” with “year”.
Anyway. Around this time a year ago, I paused my participation in big
high-school competitions, for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, I stopped attempting to make IMO both because I wouldn’t get
that much from the training and because other people ought to have the
opportunity. I was concerned that I might condition myself to only be
able to do math with the short-term motivation of contests. Better to
focus on college math and maybe some original research, I thought.
During the year, I did lots of the former and very little of the latter.
Meh.
As for the IOI, my obvious next target: I was tired of training and
going abroad while paranoid about whether my immune system would hold
up. I didn’t feel that the IOI was worth that. To some degree, I also
felt burned out about programming. Long story short, my treatment should
end soon, and learning Haskell completely resolved the burnout
problem.
But the most important reason, I think, was that “high school was too
short”. I started math competitions ridiculously early and didn’t spend
much time exploring other interests. I thought I knew myself well enough
that I could say I didn’t have many more interests at all, but I was
completely wrong (psych nerds will reflexively note this to be the
Dunning-Kruger
effect). I coded lots in weird languages — Haskell, as mentioned
previously, plus Scala, plus all manner of other magical command line
tools. I wrote my first math problem and submitted it officially, picked
up a new instrument, went to a debate competition, served as an
unimportant tech guy for MUN, discovered and became hooked on
Pentatonix, participated in three puzzle hunts in Australia and one in
Massachusetts, figured out my rough political stance, rode a boat, got
retweeted by @eevee and
@Kyrgyzstan_News, increased my
Neopets™ fortune by over 3400%, and lurked on FurAffinity a little too
much.