I wasn’t originally going to write anything about SPARC (it ended on July 30th). This is because Evan Chen’s SPARC reflection was only written after attending sparc three times (twice as a camper, once as an instructor).

But, people were collecting testimonials, so I had brainstormed things to say anyways. I ended up jotting down stuff about SPARC, and I can’t bear leaving things in a bullet note format, so here we go.

What exactly is SPARC?

I grappled with this question a lot before SPARC as well as in the opening days of SPARC. By the end, I stopped caring, which I’m pretty sure was other people too. Before I stopped caring, I settled on an analogy. MIT computer science has a missing semester” class which teaches a lot of the “soft” skills in computer science like how to use github, vim, etc (these are things that get skipped in a liberal arts education to avoid becoming a boot camp). SPARC can be seen as the missing semester, but for life.

Looking back now, I no longer believe this. It was certainly the goal, but the trajectory is inevitably influenced by the campers and staff themselves (agency!).

Yan’s (the director) informal intention was to make SPARC a mix of “the best parts of his experience MOP, RSI, & USACO Camp.” I think this is actually a pretty good descriptor (even though I’ve only done mop, Yan lowkey flexing his camps). But, without the underlying intensive academic focus of these three camps — mop was a lot of math — even if you’re doing the same things, the vibe changes. Because of that, SPARC became a “reset point.”

This was because SPARC was made up of three main groups: (1) diehard EA folks, many of whom were homeschooled and/or had dropped out of college and might be doing startups, etc. (2) Harvard/MIT freshman, and (3) rising seniors.

So, SPARC, in my personal experience, became a chance to think about you really want to do with your life. This is something that group (1) have already made a huge gamble on, group (2) will have to decide on (how to use this education), and group (3) will also have to decide on (it’s helpful to have some idea of what you want from college while choosing which colleges to apply to).

What do I want to do in life? and what’s the point?

The first question is easier to answer, and I’ve settled on broadly going into either academia or startups, although this is of course open to change. The startups option was made a lot more feasible after hearing Michael Gao’s (he’s not that famous) life story. But academia is pretty attractive too: Vladimir Rokhlin Sr. and Jr.’s Wikipedia articles link to each other which is so wholesome (and I want that with my dad).

The second question is a lot harder. Honestly, I hit rock bottom in terms of how much faith I had in there being a point to everything I was doing. College apps are, unfortunately, a black hole of meaning. Everything gets sucked in and becomes something “for college” even if it never was. And that makes everything feel meaningless. After a while back home, and looking back, I think it was just that I was really stressed about applications, and now that I’m a bit calmer, I’m reminded that my life is really interesting and my work is fascinating (positive affirmations are surprisingly powerful).

Adults are wise.

A lot of the discussion about meaning came when talking to adults. While this wasn’t the only thing we talked about, talking to adults was the best part of SPARC.

It was uniquely interesting because I (usually) do not meet people who used to do math competitions. And since they had largely the same background, a lot of them actually majorize the campers (abuse of notation, I use this word to mean “better at everything” even though it’s not the actual technical meaning). Some examples of this are stuff like Poker, Strength/Running, you can get better at a lot of stuff with an extra ten years of experience. Recently I’ve been feeling old, and this was pleasant because I was reminded that men usually peak around age 30, and I’ve still got plenty of time until then.

I also picked up a lot of powerful abstractions from them. These are the kinds of things that once you learn, it’s intuitive, but they make thinking so much easier. Examples are algebra, coordinate systems, and complex numbers. At SPARC, I learned a few more.

The first one was an “incentive gradient,” which I first picked up when talking to Neel Nanda in the context of my path of least resistance being academia. He didn’t actually define it, but I visually imagined someone sliding along a slope (gradient). I [think] it’s referring to the gradient [of your utility function].

The second one was the idea of “frames.” It’s the idea that we see the world with certain frames. I think I was in a consistent “productivity frame” throughout most of my sophomore year, which felt amazing because most of my “productivity” was doing olympiad math, and I love olympiad math. But the most important thing I realized is that the positive affirmations I do (which basically allow me to choose what emotions I’m having) are actually working by changing my frame.

Literature

But some of my frames changed, and literature/movies now have a much better position within my productivity frame. This is partly due to a conversation I had with Damon (a family therapist who taught some classes on psychology). Damon made the argument that literature gives us examples of how different people react in different scenarios. I check a lot life advice against my model of the human brain being a machine learning model, and this checks out; literature gives us training data.

It’s also valuable training data because you can see the highlights of a person’s life and see the most important moments of their life. Most of our life is given by habit, so similar to doing chess puzzles, reading literature gives you data on the critical decisions that only arise every few years (but are still incredibly important).

But it’s also partly due to my discovery of BitTorrent (not that I would ever pirate or use libgen or scihub). I was just doing some research reading into decentralized protocols and BitTorrent is unironically related work to some network stuff I was doing.

Things I do that I didn’t do before

And to give actual examples of how SPARC impacted me, here are some things I do now that I didn’t do before :).

Pool: I played a lot of pool and discovered that I’m actually decent. My proudest moment was bouncing the cue ball off a wall to hit a ball which then went in. To do this, I used geometry (similar to my basketball bank shot technique), reflecting the ball I was aiming for over the edge of the table, marking the spot, and then aiming the cue ball there.

Basketball (I did do this before): Shooting is relaxing for me. I discovered that while this has made me really good at games like Horse and Around The World, it does not translate that well to real-life shooting. Also, double rims suck. But, I was kind of decent, and I am continuing my training arc after getting some training tips from DH.
Note: A homeless guy helped ref one game and called us “engineers.” That felt wrong but he also probably prevented several injuries so whatever.

Talking To Strangers: I became the person who goes and asks for directions. I chatted with the driver on an Uber ride to the beach, and it just continued after that, I kept talking to randoms. This is something my dad does, and I’m glad that it’s finally become a habit of mine since I did this to an even larger extent in Amsterdam.

Staying up late: I only recently got back onto a good sleep schedule. I had heard of SPARC FOMO and was just like, “I’ll sleep at 12 anyways.” Yeah that didn’t happen.

Going out and about in the city: Berkeley is a surprisingly big city, and on the rest days, we went out to get food and do stuff, which is not that common of a thing at Choate (boarding school + nerds = non-classical high school experience).

Game Theory and Optimization

One of the most pleasant parts of SPARC was Hugh’s classes. He taught two classes on Game Theory, from which I actually finally got a bit of a classical introduction to the subject. I also spent some time talking to Hugh about some of my research. I also discovered that my stuff is a pretty good whiteboard flex because people seemed impressed by the math I had written down on a paper easel pad.