Today is April 11th, 2025. Anyone who knows me knows that I have dreamt of this tomorrow for around two and a half years now, hoping for a certain result. But from judging by this page’s existence, you can already guess what happened. However, don’t worry about the length of the sidebar—I’m not crying about it. Just reminiscing and thinking.
Writing in the style of Julian Gough, I present two versions of my current feelings:
I studied physics for two and a half years, divesting time from other activities that I could’ve taken part in, with a goal of becoming a member of the United States Physics Team during the summer of 2025. But I didn’t (as in I am 99.999% sure that I didn’t) make the cut, by multiple avoidable strokes of carelessness.
Nevertheless, all is well and I have not given up (why would I?) on this subject. I guess I will further procrastinate my results by aiming at an IPhO participation in 2026, where then I can possibly meet the many people I have met online in person.
I tried to catch a relativistic train. But I forgot my wallet at home. And the economy is going to shit.
I know that string of words doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I believe it perfectly encapsulates how I presently feel. Obviously however, since I am writing to you who is reading this right now… I need to say a little more.
But that is the core:
I tried to catch a relativistic train. But I forgot my wallet at home. And the economy is going to shit.
I don’t think I have ever written anything about what I have done in physics, so this is a little fun. I also don’t think that I come off as an introspective type of person, so this might read like a bit of a surprise.
To add a small heads-up, throughout this ‘preface’ I will mention the usernames of some people who have played some role in my physics life. If you have been mentioned—congrats! You have had a positive impact on my life, however large or small it might have been! However, it goes without saying that if you haven’t been mentioned, it obviously doesn’t imply the inverse.
I’ll admit, it feels a little awkward to be freely throwing out names just like that, especially when I know the people I mention will be reading this, but I’m not going to make up Alices and Bobs to anonymize some of the best people I know.
I also want to say that I’ve always taken interest in how events shape peoples’ lives, so I heavily encourage everyone reading this to write something similar.
Anyways, I guess I’ll begin now.
If you asked me why I began physics in the first place, I couldn’t even really tell you. It wasn’t like I had my parents pushing me to study anything—I had wasted my life away for the past two years and I probably could have kept on doing that if I so pleased.
My best explanation is that I wanted to prove myself. I had always thought of myself as a smart kid, since I did everything mathematical mentally and had a high IQ score (both of which I now realize don’t really determine your intelligence… to an extent). But I didn’t really have anything to show for it. As I said before, I was in a pretty big slump—mostly attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, I decided to begin olympiad physics. It might be important to note that I had minimal olympiad math exposure.
But why physics in particular? From here it deviates from “I have some foggy memory of this being true” to pure speculation. Yes, I am speculating and theorizing about my 14 year old self. That’s how bad my memory is.
If I had to guess, I would say that my interests slightly leaned towards science. I would probably credit this to the forces of early childhood NOVA documentaries and elementary school consumption of the Popular Science magazine. This combined with me being a very straightforward type of person who likes to see clearly what is really going on—if I can’t see it it isn’t real caveman logic—made me settle on the science of physics.
My first experience with physics was buying an international version of Introduction to Classical Mechanics by David Morin. If you know anything about that book, you would know that an absolute beginner would most definitely make no sense of it. And sure enough, I didn’t.
My first real experience with physics was second semester freshman year with the physics AOPS class sometime around the beginning of second semester. But it’s safe to say that I didn’t really learn much. I recall starting off with measurements and some kinematics and then jumping straight into conservation of energy—without even learning Newton’s Laws! In retrospect, the only thing I really gained from that class was a somewhat neat way of deriving the required masses for force balance with a pulley setup with strings running along two different angled inclines, which is formally known as the Epitaph of Stevinus.
While I was taking this class, I had begun self-studying pre-calculus on my own, using my Ex’s AOPS precalculus books. We broke up after some short time, and then I returned the books to her.
No, book, singular. Because I forgot to return the solutions manual.
Sorry. It’s still on my desk to this day.
Continuing on, needless to say, I stopped paying attention less than halfway through the class, and began a similarly unwise journey by beginning with Problems And Solutions in Introductory Mechanics by David Morin. It’s not a bad book, just a really terrible choice of an introductory book. Because I had so little conceptual grasp of what was going on, I was writing F/m=a_net for most of the problems and accidentally had been using the centrifugal force instead of centripetal acceleration up until the last chapter, where I finally figured out what was going on.
Not gonna lie that 3/4 of a year was not used very efficiently.
But there was at least one positive in that year of 2023.
I joined PhODS in April of 2023. I remember my first message was actually a question in the questions thread, asking if the solution to a physics problem I wrote was right. Looking back at it, I think all of it was wrong.
Going a bit off topic, I remember posting the physics problems and physics activities I was writing and doing to my Instagram stories and profile, where a lot of people I knew well and didn’t know well saw. Safe to say I didn’t really know how to use Instagram. They’re all deleted or expired now.
Now back to PhODS. I became fairly active there, and gradually started building connections. Other than that, I don’t remember much more, besides that I probably wasn’t very helpful or smart.
A little bit before my sophomore year of high school, I finally dipped my toes into the tried and tested methods of physics olympiad preparation, which was working through Physics by Halliday, Resnick, and Krane. After finishing the first volume, I started Electricity and Magnetism by Edward Purcell and David Morin instead of starting the second volume.
Then F=ma exam season rolled around.
At that point I had some pretty good olympiad mechanics exposure (I scored 15/25 on the PhODS mock F=ma that year, which was exactly its cutoff!), so I kept on working through Purcell, confident that I would qualify, only working through one or two mock exams.
I scored 11/25.
Dang that’s pretty terrible.
I was talking a lot of smack about the exam too.
Not the greatest look and certainly not the greatest hit to my reputation.
I guess that’s what overconfidence gets you.
In retrospect I would have rather learned my lesson in humility then than later in the future—I would even go as far as to say that more people need an event like that to happen to them. Humility really doesn’t seem like a common trait nowadays. And I feel like this sentiment is shared by most of the people I know.
Eventually, I got back on track and finished Purcell and the non-EM non-nuclear section of HRK. Most of this was due to arguably one of the most impactful events of my life:
Watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners during my time in Shanghai.
I won’t discuss why for certain reasons. But you should go watch it if you haven’t already.
(Also during that time in Shanghai, I picked up a copy of 国际物理奥赛的培训与选拔 by 郑永令!)
There really isn’t much else to say. Besides my exam failure, nothing incredibly interesting happened. It was mostly just learning and doing problems according to a standard route.
My junior year of highschool was when I finally started working on Kevin Zhou’s olympiad handouts, the best high level physics olympiad resource. It also marked the point where I was reputable enough to be a trustworthy source in physics discussion, and thus propelled me to a point where I actually began having memorable interactions with PhODS members.
My first of these was when I teamed up with Accuide and 0^0 for OPhO, a three day online competition. Although we missed the invitationals cutoff by a few questions, I was somewhat satisfied with my performance, as I wasn’t getting completely carried by my teammates—I believe I had exactly one third of our total solves, despite making an unammusing amount of factor of two errors. It was fun, and I must thank both Accuide and 0^0 for committing their time to grinding this competition with me.
Similarly, when Physics Brawl rolled around, I again managed to clinch a spot on a team with some incredible PhODS members. Teaming up with Oz, Stargazist, Local Physics Apprentice, and 0^0 (again!), we had a relatively good placement in our category. Overall, we definitely could have placed higher had we paid more attention to the rules of the exam, as we accidentally threw away a huge amount of potential bonus points. My performance here compared to the last team event even improved, having 10/31 of our group’s total solves. Again, I must thank my teammates for the fun we had competing in this contest, especially when our time zones were all over the place.
(I want to throw out that somewhere in the middle of this I watched Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. Also one of my most life-changing events.)
But while those connections stemmed from the competitive aspect of olympiad physics, my strongest connections derived from its community aspect.
I remember one day discussing the idea of playing Minecraft bedwars in a PhODS call with a guy primarily known for the rotisserie chicken he bought at a Costco. Later that night, me and the guy, Yukko, along with Lightmargin hopped into a call and did just that.
(Sorry, I couldn’t find a more eloquent way of emphasising the importance of a moment as simple as gaming.)
Eventually the frequency of these gaming sessions grew and so did the amount of people who joined us. ItsDenry, Ryang2, Sohlstyce, Apochrome, and Tristan all joined us at some point in playing Minecraft, and as a result a group chat was formed. Jsaac and R3ality_cubed also joined us, despite not partaking in gaming.
This all led to the creation of the PhODS SMP, which effectively destroyed my productivity all of winter break. I don’t regret it though, even after knowing the situation I am in now.
Altogether, meeting people through PhODS has been an amazing experience. I am extremely grateful to have met other incredible people through the medium of PhODS voice channels, including GusterBuster27, Jhiliard, Trekr, Lilian, SPYDUKC, Deleted, and ENTL (without counting names I have already mentioned before). I have also met many great people solely through chat interaction, which I will not list since there are simply too many.
But enough reminiscing—I’ll just get to the point.
I realize that the next time I will have an opportunity to have a chance at camp is one year from now. If I did make it, time probably would’ve flown by. But this one year until the next time this train of opportunity pulls back into the station feels like forever.
Last year’s one year felt so short since I had so much more to learn. This year’s one year feels dilated because I know I could have camped.
But I didn’t.
So that leads me to my next point:
I attribute most of my point margin from camp to reading comprehension. I missed 1.3 problems because of it. Worst of all, 1.3 simple problems.
I know reading comprehension is a bad excuse. I’ve been told time and time again, “reading comprehension is an important skill.”
It was just surprising how it hadn’t been a problem before, but it managed to pop up then. And I don’t think competition stress was the issue.
I just made a mistake as trivial as leaving my wallet at home—but again maybe if I were a high roller in the first place I would’ve had a fat stack of cash in my pocket.
Unrelated to current events, I know that next year’s train tickets will be a lot harder for me to buy.
The difference between a USAPhO top 20 scorer and USAPhO top 10 scorer is huge. AAPT made it that way to ensure that only potential IPhO competitors can make it in.
This means I will have to reach an IPhO level of knowledge.
It will be hard, but it’s probably doable, so long as I don’t pull anything stupid again.
I really love that emoji. But that’s besides the point.
I was initially extremely upset when I woke up, immediately getting hit by the “realization” stage of grief. During that short period of time, I thought of writing this, and now here I am.
Although my sadness has passed, it’s still hard to not be disappointed. But I realize I have better things to worry about.
Before the exam, I had so many things I wanted to learn but had to delay due to the tightness of my schedule. Now that I do have what feels like infinite time, I can finally start working on them. For instance:
I had promised one of my friends that I would begin to commit time to learn how to draw, and I owe it to her since the reason that we became friends is because I randomly reached out to her many months ago asking for advice on how to start. But my motivations are not entirely based on guilt however—I firmly believe that the power to create anything you want is an immensely useful and impressive skill to possess.
I have also wanted to become good at poker for a while, since apparently it’s an easy transition from chess and actually makes money. And also because I want to take money from my friends.
I love singing. It’s probably a hobby I’ll never let go of. At the time of writing this, I have mainly been singing Pure Imagination. I sing every day and have a full list of songs I can sing decently well here.
I quit climbing some years ago, and still think it’s a fun sport. I have more motivation to return now, seeing as how more people I know around my age have picked it up recently.
I began playing badminton a few months ago, and have really come to enjoy it. It’s extremely fast paced, and overall an incredible exercise. Also, since some Asian parents can kick my ass, I really want to beat them. Don’t underestimate their strength.
Lastly, I really enjoy writing and want to improve.
Similar to drawing, I believe that the power to explain anything you want coherently is an incredibly useful and impressive skill to possess.
Also similar to drawing, I don’t have much experience in writing.
As I haven’t been able to dedicate hours to this extent recently, spending time writing this truly makes for a great change of pace.
I think I might want to write more like this in the future.
So yeah, that’s basically my centerpiece for the past two and a half years of life.
I hope you learned something about me.
With love,
amatAf