Many of my teachers remarked me as “reassuring”, and a lot of my friends have told me that “It seems that you’re so chilled but you actually know what you’re doing”. Yes, I was born with a phlegmatic personality, but it was not until last year when I “failed” the AMC (luckily I was still qualified for the AIME) that I started to learn how to manage time and resource wisely and actually grew up.
I spent my first 14 years in my life in China, and in the summer 2013, I moved to US with my family, seeking for new challenges-- I’ve always believed that unfamiliar environment provokes one to learn the most. However though I thought I was prepared for the worst, things got out of hand, as how it goes every time one is put in a new wonder land. It didn’t take more than a month to surmount the language barrier, but
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So instead I started out by taking online video courses on a Chinese website called “xueersi”, and do practice problems on topics they don’t cover in China in books bought here, namely Intermediate Counting and Probablity and Intermediate Number Theory, both produced by AoPS. I’m taking advantage of the free online college classes (namely edX and MOOK) to study programming as well. In fact I was luckily promoted to the Silver division in the USACO this year while I had programmed in C++ for only 3 days. Aside from the majority of free time I spend on math and computer science, I study 30 new vocabulary words and 120 old words, and read 1-2 news on Bloomberg every day, to improve my English skills. My schedule sounds full, but I still have 2-3 hours remaining if I don’t waste any time. In fact I get to run about 5 miles regardless weather every