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Would I Do It Again?

I was asked by a friend if I would go into STEM olympiads if I could relive my grade school experience. I was honestly surprised by this question, mainly because the person I was talking to was the most respected “math person” at our school. They clearly had olympiad success and from various team competitions I knew they genuinely loved problem-solving and math. So when they answered the question, I wondered why they would erase such a big part of their life.

I see my friend’s point, olympiads don’t give you practically applicable skills. Most people don’t practice olympiad math while looking for a job, why would you need to? And from a pure utility, “the most benefit in the least amount of time,” point of view, maybe working on hobby projects is the best way to get the most bang for your buck. Working on building a robot or writing a website relates directly to what someone might want to explore in the future. But should we really be looking to think like this as high school students? One of the key features of high school is exploring what we genuinely find interesting rather than tailoring ourselves to a specific career. There’s a reason olympiads don’t exist for college students: they have more practical and career focused things to work on.

Talking to other USACO Campers (who obviously have had lots of success in olympiads), I heard a similar sentiment. The answer to this question seemed obvious for many of them, they could not have devoted so much time into something that they don’t enjoy. But, an inherent part of doing olympiads a lot is that you haven’t given as much thought to other activities. Inherently, going deep into something means you didn’t go that deep into something else, which was an argument against why USACO Campers aren’t the fair judges of how relatively fun olympiads are. In reality, this fact makes Campers the best at judging olympiads. It's almost impossible to spend so much time doing something without genuinely enjoying it more than alternatives that you’ve also tried. 

Even beyond fun, I argue that olympiads teach you something intangible, applicable to more than just a single domain. You can learn how to build a website or every part of the human cell, but you can’t learn how to think. Olympiads foster your intuition and set you up for a successful career anywhere, which I think is the most useful skill there is.

Another cliché that came up from this discussion was that people who succeed in olympiads lack great social skills. I see where this is coming from, empathy and emotional intelligence are learned skills, and spending time grinding olympiads means you can’t develop this through social interaction. However I think this idea isn’t unique to olympiads. Everyone likes something and will spend a lot of time doing that something, drawing them closer to other people also interested in that something. This forms the stem of everyone’s social interactions, the same way olympiad communities do for some people. Being drawn towards and relating with people who are similar is the way everyone develops emotional intelligence and there isn’t any reason it should be lacking in olympiad students. In general, finding moderation is the key.

My answer to this question was simple. I would do olympiads again. Not because I’ve been successful. Not even because they’ve always been fun for me, in fact they sometimes weren’t. I’d do it all over again only because of certain moments that I cherish. The moments where I see how perfectly nuanced a problem, no, the world, really is.

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