Oops, it’s not the weekend anymore, and this blog post is late. Anyways, my excuse is that I was studying for my first and most stressful TEE (Term End Experience), a history test. TEE is such a wacky euphemism, I want to refer to this coming week as “finals week” but I just can’t get myself to stop referring to it as “TEE Week.”

Introduction

I’ve wanted to write about the idea in the title, the fact that school is a day job, for a long time. This idea isn’t mine. I came across it last year in Paul Graham’s Essay “What You’ll Wish You’d Known“. If you have the time, I highly recommend reading the entire essay. (after finishing this blog post first of course) It’s quite long but it’s a good read. Anyways, the relevant excerpt is:

If I had to go through high school again, I’d treat it like a day job. I don’t mean that I’d slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn’t mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn’t think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn’t think of himself as a waiter. And when I wasn’t working at my day job I’d start trying to do real work.

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

I only decided to write about this because of something one of my teachers said in class. I go to a pretty good school, and I have some really cool classes that I love. They feel valuable, and sometimes the material ends up being the thing I think about in the shower [1].

However, I wish that I would/could spend less time on my day job (school). In the long enough term, I think this path makes you better at school. Of course, spending less time on school is not immediately beneficial, and is also reliant on you spending your free time meaningfully. Regardless, I claim there exists some constant M for which if you slack in school for M months and do cooler stuff instead, you’ll do better in school. In a short time frame, if you work on a personal project instead of spending another few hours agonizing over an essay, your grades will suffer, but actually learning and improvement come from outside of the classroom.

Contests

Recently, I, without fail, seem to end up saying to myself “I wish I practiced more” after each contest. My sophomore year was nice because I got a couple of definitive wins, but nothing like that has come along yet this year. There’s a potpourri of possible reasons, me having higher standards, everything being more competitive or something, bad luck, etc. But the real reason is that I’ve been focusing way too much on school.

This year, if you look at my logs, I do my homework first, and occasionally, if I have time, I do olympiads/contests. Last year, math was the thing I did, and I did a couple of days’ worth of schoolwork a couple of times a week. It was amazing, other than the days when I had to do homework for a big project, I didn’t have to do anything other than math. This year, in the fall, I still did math every Saturday. But in the winter term, I only really did AIME problems but never managed to find large chunks of time during the week to do olympiad.

What really happened was a big mentality shift. In the same way that a 4.5-hour contest used to seem insane but is now pedestrian, I’ve grown accustomed to sinking in many hours and whole evenings into essays. Sophomore year, MF refuted my silly assertion that teachers give better grades to seniors by remarking that seniors also work a lot harder, and I understand that now. Compared to my freshman self, who just wanted to finish the homework and move on to go play Clash Royale and do other wasteful activities, I now for better or worse treat school the same way I used to treat contests, I work on it as much as possible. There was always more math to prep, and there’s also always more that can be done to refine school assignments.

Life is a lot worse now that school dominates my life. It’s really hard to find meaning in school because the only thing making it worthwhile is the grades. You can argue that “it’s for the learning,” but I learn way more from doing math contests, coding side projects, and reading about stuff on my own. Hopefully, I can balance the two more in the Spring. The scary thing is that after USAMO on the 22/23nd and USACO on the weekend after that, if (when?) I learn that I didn’t qualify for USAPhO, there would not be anything specific to prep for, so I’d probably be left to focus on school. Research is a lifeline because it would prevent school from being the only thing in my intellectual life.

Although I’m annoyed by this, there’s not a lot I can do. I’m a junior now, and this is the unfortunate reality. I’ve said most of what I wanted to say about school, so it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming where I talk about what my life was/is like.

On an unrelated note, I took USACO yesterday. I, unfortunately, can not discuss it yet because the window is still open.

APs

I’m also really torn about whether or not to sign up for APUSH. I’ve already signed up for AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism, AP Physics C: Mechanics, and AP Statistics. The deadline is tomorrow, and I’m still pretty torn. For the other 3, and the 4 I’ve already taken(Calc, Chem, Chinese, Comp Sci), I’ve had a comparative advantage with respect to the average test-taker. For mathy/sciency APs, even if the Choate class wasn’t designed for the AP, I could still get by since I have a stack of 30 notebooks in my study filled with math I’ve done in the past 2 years.

However, what concerns me about USH is APUSH’s massive homework load. That means that from the classwork perspective, I’m at a big disadvantage. Due to APUSH’s standardized curriculum, I can be sure that the average test taker has a lot more practice than me. Then, this means that it comes down to whether my writing is better than public school people’s. I hope that standards for writing are higher at Choate, but I have no idea if this is actually true. I can objectively see that it’s true for stem stuff, but it’s a lot harder to compare in the humanities.

Goodbye Wordle, Hello NYT Mini Crossword

https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords

The mini has gotten me through a couple of long nights in the past few weeks. I don’t do the wordle anymore, but I could never do the new ones at midnight, that’s way too late. However, the mini drops at 10pm each night, so I’ve been doing it as soon as possible each night. The leaderboard is also really nice.

On the topic of wordle, I ran a Linguistics Club Wordle Tournament last Friday. It went better than I expected. DG and I organized it, and although there were hiccups in our logistics, it was mostly papered over by the fact that we had five boxes of pizza and a massive stuffed bear as a prize.

Coding: Election Simulating

I’ve also been doing a bunch of coding. Last weekend, when I wasn’t in war-news-induced-unproductivity, I put together code in: https://github.com/YunruiRyanYang/elections

In our school’s elections for Student Council, etc., approval voting is used. The goal of this little project was to justify why I try to vote for exactly half of the candidates. From an information theory perspective, this conveys the most information, and in the repo’s simulations, I tried to show that running approval voting where everyone votes for the candidates in their top half best simulates the “gold standard” Schulze method. (I only chose it b/c CPU uses it for their elections)

Email Forwarding

My email forwarding system has made my outbox (list of sent emails) completely useless. Fixing this will be quite a pain, and is something for future Ryan to handle.

Spring Break Stuff

SPARC: The prompts are actually so cool. I judge programs by their admissions materials, and the essay questions are concise but amazing. Is it bad if after reading them, my first thought wasn’t about what to write, but instead that “these questions are great conversation starters.”

NYT Essay Contest: It’s so much work though. I’m not quite sure what I would write about, but I still have some time. I think I’ll probably try to explain machine learning.

USAMO: Time to get back on the grind :). Last Tuesday, I spent 5 hours working on IMO 2013/3, and the feeling after solving it reminded me why I fell in love with olympiads.

[1] This is the highest honor (http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html)