Solitude and Society

I’m sorry for being inactive for a long time. I have not done a good job of maintaining this blog throughout the past few months :(((( I’ve become really cooked leading up to the Caltech Math Meet (CMM)…

When I was at competitions in high school, I’d sometimes wonder what it was like for the organizers. Sometimes I’d even wish that I could switch places with them for a little bit, to relieve myself a little bit from all the nervousness and stress that would be filling my head as I tried to solve math problems to the best of my ability. Well now I have switched places with them, and now I know…

I have very mixed emotions. There were high highs (well, I guess the competition day) and lots of low lows. :( I guess it’s a big and exciting project, but at the same time as a Caltech student I felt like it was just some random side-quest that I was sinking way too much time in. People around me were getting real internships and doing real research, and I was just sinking all my time into this random… high school math competition? Surely that could not be the right thing to do. I was head of both Problem Writing and Logistics (first time being head of either) because no one else really wanted to… no one else was willing to sacrifice so much academics-and-schoolwork time for time spent on CMM. Caltech students basically spend all their time on academics because, well, they’re really serious about securing a good future for themselves. As a result, I did many tasks myself — I basically wrote most of the Power Round (which is why the quality was kinda questionable) (Vincent also helped a lot with it), wrote quite a few other problems, coordinated sponsorships and room reservations and communicated with participants via email, managed the Caltech volunteers, drew the T-shirt design (with help from Esther), etc. I’m not even mad at other Caltech students for not helping more — they have no obligation to. It was my choice to take on this project and expand CMM and try to make it as good as possible (I tried my best), so it is my obligation.

I was honestly so stressed about CMM for the last couple of weeks/months before CMM. Since there were no higher-ups, if something went wrong then it really was just my fault. The entire competition was basically just tons of bullet points in my head and in piles of notes, AKA my DM’s with the Discord LaTeX bot. Unfortunately, until mid-December I had been completely locked in on fall-term academics (basically the way Caltech is, you spend ALL your time on problem sets and barely have time to sleep let alone other things…) and basically I had done on CMM was secure sponsorships and reserve most of the rooms, so when winter break came around I really had to lock in. There was really only one month or so between the start of winter break and the competition. During the second week of winter break, I wrote problems for Individual/Team/Tiebreaker rounds and testsolved other peoples’ problems. Then I worked on the Power Round with a TON of help from Vincent (he basically gave me all the ideas, and I wrote them out). The Power Round is always really tricky to write because it’s supposed to be a higher math topic but my higher math knowledge is very very limited, and originally I wasn’t planning on writing most of the Power Round, but the people who had been assigned weren’t really working on it so I had to cover for them. The Power Round took a really long time to write because it was pretty long and I also had to learn the material at the same time, so it took me until literally the release date (January 10th) to write it. At the same time, I was communicating with Caltech admin about logistics like finalizing room reservations and making sure Security would actually unlock the buildings for us1 and picking up boxes of T-shirts from the mailing office.

During the last two weeks between January 10th and January 24th, I became exponentially more cooked. My classes also ramped up during those two weeks — winter term, which is 10 weeks long, started on January 5th, so fortunately the CMM grind period was a the beginning of term when I tended to be less busy, but I was still attending classes every day and by the 2nd week I started having homework that was quite nontrivial. Right after the Power Round was released, I answered all the questions that were pouring in about it and fixed many mistakes in it. During the 2nd-to-last week (January 10th to 17th) I was probably replying to around 10 CMM emails every day. It started to hit that that this was a real, big, in-person event and there were so many in-person logistics to finalize, such as where to print ~3000 pieces of paper, how to get projector access in rooms where we need it, how to find storage space for all the merch that would be arriving soon, how to communicate instructions to all ~30 of the Caltech volunteers who had signed up for CMM with little idea beforehand of what they were supposed to do, etc. My head was constantly filled with wondering how I was going to pull everything together and have everyone on the same page in the right place at the right time.

On January 13th, I frantically made a document titled “CMM T-” in which for each remaining day I listed out things that should ideally be done on/by that day. On January 14th, I went to an administrative office to figure out how much money was in our bank account (because we still had quite a few things to pay for) and realized that we were a little short on money so I panicked and reached out to sponsors again last-minute, and fortunately we ended up fine in the end. On January 15th, I ordered 480 bagels and 600 subway sandwiches with the help of an administrative official (because I didn’t have that $8k in my own bank account), and walked around campus to figure out which printers would be best for printing all of our tests. Toward the end of that week, I also started to have meetings with administrators to go over things like general facilities logistics and what buildings we were going to be using, etc.

And that was only the logistics side of things. I also needed to make sure problem writing went well and that we would actually have decent tests. So far, I had testsolved the most problem proposals out of everyone on our team, so I honestly had the most well-informed idea of how to put together the tests. On January 17th, T-7, I met with the person who was second most familiar with the problems, and we talked for a few hours and came up with a rough idea of how to put together the tests, which was very helpful.

My life was absolutely insane at this point, but it was only going to get worse. Up to this point, I had managed to still get 7-8 hours of sleep a night, but this would steeply decline. I got 0 hours of sleep on January 16th to do an assignment due that day, and then got 9 hours of sleep the night after. But during the last week I got 7, 6, 6, 6, 5.5, 7, 1 hours2, and was also working constantly throughout the day, more busily than I’ve ever worked before.

On January 16th, I got an email saying that 27 large boxes of merch had arrived at the mailing office and had to be moved someplace else. This was the first CMM-related task that was too physically demanding for me to do myself, so I called up some other people on the team. Unfortunately we had not yet secured a place to store such a large amount of materials (we had no club office or space or anything) so I sent out some frantic emails and a kind administrator lent us some of his office space.

On Sunday, January 18th and Monday, January 19th, I tried to finish all my homework for the next week, as I believed this was necessary since I’d have enough CMM-related work to fill the entire week and hence no time for schoolwork. Unfortunately, even though I grinded basically all day the plan was not successful… there were still 1-2 pretty nontrivial assignments that I’d have to do throughout the last week before the competition.

Mental health-wise, I was honestly not okay during this time. My brain was constantly exploding with all 10 billion competition-related things I needed to think about, and it felt lonelier than ever because I was the only one in this situation. No one else at Caltech would really understand how I felt; in fact, I felt like many people looked down on me for spending so much time on CMM rather than academics. It was all just up to me to make sure everything worked out — there was no one else to really lean on. One day during the long weekend I went on a walk and just couldn’t stop crying the whole time. There were many times when I just spontaneously started crying. I felt simultaneously like it was a huge operation that I couldn’t handle and also that it was… nothing. Because in the eyes of other Caltech people, it really is nothing — nothing compared to research projects or internships or things that actually do help you become successful career-wise. CMM was something that I should get done as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible, but at the same time that I had to pour everything into. I was kinda broken inside, and just wanted it to be over already. I just wanted it to be January 25th already, and to skip the whole next week which I predicted would be absolutely brutal.

On Sunday January 18th, I remembered that we needed to make maps to send out to everyone so that they would know where various rooms around campus are, so I did it right then and there — plugged my tablet into my computer and annotated an image of a map. On Monday night, I realized that I hadn’t yet bought large signs reading names of various Caltech buildings, which we absolutely needed to guide competitors to the right places, so I bought them off of signsonthecheap.com for a price much higher than it should have been because of how last-minute the order was. I also ordered folders, pencils, and 20 reams of paper from Amazon that night.

Then the long weekend ended, there were 4 more days to finalize everything, and we were not close at all. I ran three in-person meetings to brief Caltech volunteers on what to do (three because Proctoring, Grading, and Logistics) which I felt was necessary because many of them hadn’t been to math competitions before and/or didn’t know the exact format of CMM. Before each meeting, I threw together a slideshow in 30-45 minutes. I also met with a few other problem writers to compile the Individual/Team/Tiebreaker rounds.

Throughout the week we received approximately 40 more large boxes of merch/CMM materials, some so heavy that I could barely lift them, so I had to recruit other people on my team to help with the physical labor again. On January 21st, the math building administrator kindly gave me a key to an empty office in the math building, which was a godsend. We filled the small office with boxes which we wheeled on carts from the mailing office, and later packed every inch of floor space with ~400 tote bags for the contestants.

On Tuesday January 21st, I quit attending class and being caught up on classes — there was simply no time; working on CMM was a full-time job at this point. I accepted that I was going to be a week behind on classes once CMM was over. I didn’t have time to think about how I was being a bad student by prioritizing CMM over my academics anymore, because it simply had to be done — I didn’t have time to think about anything other than CMM.

On Wednesday January 22nd, I threw together a schedule on Canva in less than an hour and ordered it to be printed at FedEx, and then picked up 500 schedules and 500 maps the next morning. On Thursday January 22nd, I emailed the Caltech library with files for the Puzzle Hunt, Individual and Team rounds, and Individual Round answer sheet so that they could be printed in time (it was actually very last-minute). I had also promised my team that I would help with Power Round grading, but throughout the week this ended up being pushed later and later as I realized how many other things I had to do, so I wondered when I would ever have time to do it. I went to the mail office every day to pick up boxes, to the point that the employees there knew me by face and didn’t need to ask for my ID number. I had an assignment due on Friday January 23rd at 9am, and simply accepted that I wasn’t going to do very well on it because I simply did not have an entire day to dedicate to it. Since I was exhausted on Thursday night, I physically didn’t feel able to pull an all-nighter and accidentally slept from midnight until 7am on Friday morning, which gave me only 2 hours to speedrun the assignment, and indeed I didn’t do very well on it.

Throughout the last week, other people on my team did help with CMM more. People actually showed up to the Proctoring/Grading/Logistics meetings, which made me happy because I could see firsthand that I wasn’t working on this project alone. Many times, other people on my team helped wheel boxes around campus on carts, and we probably looked very strange trying to control these large carts with large amounts of inertia. I was originally thinking that I’d need to lead the tote bag packing3 and that it would take most of the afternoon+evening on Thursday, but by some miracle there were somehow 5-10 people, many of who were my friends, interested in helping with this so they told me to leave and do other work that I really needed to do. I was honestly stunned by the initiative and leadership that they put forth with this.

Vincent came in clutch with writing basically all the integrals for our Integration Bee, which I was completely crashing out about since none of the Caltech students on our team really had any experience with Integration Bees. Also, around 10 Berkeley students enthusiastically offered to help with CMM and drive down to campus, which was an absolute godsend. Several of them had Integration Bee experience and were willing to help run the Integration Bee. One Berkeley student, Aarush, ran the whole Integration Bee on the contest day. I was honestly overjoyed by how enthusiastic all the Berkeley students seemed about helping with CMM. I was kind of under the impression that college students didn’t really care about running math competitions because getting internships and doing cool research and having fun was much more important, but seeing them kinda proved me wrong.

There would be many more miracles throughout the next 2 days that would allow CMM to happen.

On Friday January 23rd, I woke up and immediately picked up the 2000 pieces of paper that the Caltech library had printed for us, and started stapling them and putting them in folders. The other people on my team were in class, but I skipped class to do it because, although just menial labor, this task absolutely had to be done. At 1pm I checked on the setup of the room that was going to be used for Friday Night events — someone was setting up a projector and microphone there, but I noticed that there were far too few chairs, so I ended up having to frantically email someone and call someone else until, by a stroke of luck, Caltech custodial was able to supply the chairs in time even though I should have reached out 2 weeks ago (oops). I then spent 1-2 hours moving boxes with a few other members of the team into a building right next to the lawn on which the boxes would be unpacked the next morning. We took many trips with carts borrowed from the mailing office, moving approximately 60 boxes across campus. Then I helped set up for Friday Night Events, but had to dip at the start of the event because I had a ton of work to do that night — working on the solution documents for Individual/Team/Tiebreaker rounds, grading Power Round, and making the Opening Ceremony slideshow.

Many people came in clutch with Power Round grading, in particular Chenning, Vincent, and Eduardo. Grading is something that takes me a long time, so I actually significantly overestimated how much of it I could do, and they covered for me while also sacrificing a bit of their sleep, which I was very moved by. While I was running around campus making sure various things were set up properly, they were grinding Power Round grading at their computers. I think we definitely have a couple of Power Round-related takeaways for next year.

I really hoped that I wouldn’t have to pull an all-nighter on the last night because I was so exhausted from the entire past week, but as the night progressed, the amount of sleep that I’d be able to get dwindled. I had to be up by 6am to set up for breakfast and check-in at the competition location. By 4am I had finished writing up solutions to all my Individual/Team/Tiebreaker round problems, and graded a couple of Power Round problems, but realized there was a fatal error in the Power Round grading — we had neglected to grade the submissions for many teams which hadn’t assigned pages for their submissions on Gradescope. The sleep deprivation caused me to spiral, and even though this wasn’t that bad of a mistake, I felt like it would be very hard to fix and ultimately forced myself to bed for an hour. All the rest of the Power Round grading team — Chenning, Vincent, Eduardo, and Ryan — stayed up really late that night and didn’t get enough sleep, and I honestly cannot be more grateful to them for their sacrifices.

Waking up at 6am on the morning of CMM after having gotten 1 hour of sleep might’ve been the hardest wake-up I’ve ever experienced. But I forced myself out of bed and to my desk to get started on the Opening Ceremony slideshow. Getting it done in 15 minutes was a very ambitious goal of mine especially given how heavy my eyelids were — I got a significant portion done in 15 minutes, but not all of it. Then I had to run outside, move some carts to the breakfast/check-in area, and get breakfast set up. The check-in volunteers and I were in the process of moving the 60 boxes and tote bags onto the lawn where breakfast and check-in were, when the lawn started filling with people so they had to switch gears to running check-in and I had to go back to working on the Opening Ceremony slideshow.

This was when it really hit me how much the Berkeley volunteers would come in clutch — they showed up out of nowhere and started wheeling all the carts with materials to the right place. I told them that we needed to check that all the Individual Round locations were unlocked, and it didn’t seem like any Caltech volunteers were awake and free to run to all 4 of these lecture halls around campus to check on the locations. But the Berkeley students somehow managed to do it despite being completely unfamiliar with campus, which was an absolute godsend. Throughout the whole day, they were somehow always at the right place at the right time, running around campus delivering materials such as scratch paper to testing rooms which needed it, setting up the lunch and merch on tables in an organized fashion. Even though we had approximately 30 Caltech volunteers helping with CMM, I underestimated the number of “extra” helpers we needed to just run things to different places and help out with random things last-minute, but the Berkeley volunteers bridged this gap perfectly.

Throughout the contest day, I was unable to be everywhere at once, so I just helped out with whatever needed to be done — finalizing solution documents during the Individual Round, checking that Team Round locations were unlocked and set up during lunch, making sure that the Integration Bee Finals started smoothly, and then helping with Team Round grading in the afternoon. Since so many things were happening concurrently during the afternoon, I wasn’t able to oversee the Integration Bee Finals, the Admissions Events, the Faculty Lecture, or Power Round Grading, but other people on the team came in clutch there which I am eternally grateful for. I had also expected to need to compile the Closing Ceremony slideshow myself, but someone else started doing this before I had the chance to, allowing me to deliver the boxes of awards from my room to the Closing Ceremony auditorium. The Berkeley volunteers came in clutch with setting up the Closing Ceremony and laying out all the awards on the table. By the end of the day, we ended half an hour overtime, just 15 minutes before we would be kicked out of the auditorium, thanks to everyone putting forth so much effort where it was needed.

And suddenly, everything was over. All the worries could finally melt away.

The Berkeley students and I helped to clean up the lawn and our “staff headquarters”. We chatted a bit, and I absolutely love their energy — it’s amazing and still really surprising to me how much they genuinely care about helping with math competitions, even those which aren’t their own, because I’m so used to being the only one who feels this way. Around them, I felt the opposite of lonely. They are actually the dream team and they make me realize why people love running math competitions.

I brought one box of extra CMM materials back to my room — it was such a relief to have just one box, and not 60 — and then called Vincent and took a shower. The adrenaline that had kept me running on 1 hour of sleep the entire day, and for the entire past week, suddenly ran out and I crashed in bed at 9:30pm. I slept for 11.5 hours that night and woke up happier than I had been in weeks, even though I was a week behind on all my classes and had to immediately get on the grind to do some last-minute CMM things such as sending out a post-CMM email and many score reports as well as a mountain of schoolwork.

The stress of doing schoolwork just does not compare to the stress that I felt in the last week before CMM.

With CMM, there’s no ceiling — the sky is the limit — the more time and effort I put in, the better it will be. There’s always something more to do — I’m never doing enough. With schoolwork, on the other hand, once I solve all the problems on the assignment, it’s done; I can go do something else. I know that there’s a fixed number of hours or amount of effort I need to put in, and then I’ll be done for the time being. On problem sets, I have many resources to fall back on — Office Hours, my friends, the professor, the internet — and I know that there will be answers somewhere; there are other people in the class who have solved the problems. However, with CMM I basically just have to do a bunch of things myself, some of which I don’t even know about and which will pop out of nowhere, and some of which may not be possible.

CMM definitely taught me that I’m capable of more than I think. That there’s no such thing as being too tired. Even if I’m on 1 hour of sleep and thoroughly exhausted, I can still get things done if I really need to. I can still force my brain to work if it needs to. I can type faster if I need to, walk faster if I need to.

However, the utter chaos that the last week of CMM preparation was, and my insane levels of stress, could have been prevented by doing more things ahead of time. Finalizing the Individual/Team/Tiebreaker rounds could have been done during the fall rather than literally the week before the competition. The whole CMM team should have gotten started on problem writing much earlier, set a hard deadline for the end of fall to get all the problems written, and ideally have had all the rounds (Individual, Team, Tiebreaker, Power) pretty much compiled before Winter Break. I should have realized that logistics would steeply ramp up shortly before the competition, as we’d have meetings with Caltech administrators, need to move tons of boxes, and physically go to locations around campus and arrange in-person things, etc. Given that I was running both logistics and problem writing, it would have helped a lot to not have problem writing to think about at the height of the logistics business.

In the future, I’d like to not be the head of both — I think this year was particularly difficult because the previous head organizers both dropped out after last year, and our team was extremely small last year, so I was really the only returning person interested in a leadership role. This year, however, we’ve recruited countless freshmen who definitely have potential for leadership roles in the future, now that they have helped out with one CMM and are familiar with how stuff goes.

CMM did have a few other positive impacts on me. I got noticeably stronger, from lifting boxes and pulling carts and running around campus. I averaged 13.5k steps per day in the last week before CMM, compared to the usual 8k. It was significantly easier to carry stacks of plates while working as a waiter at Caltech after those last few weeks versus before. (However, those gained muscles might depreciate since I don’t exercise like that normally.)

CMM also forced me to get out of my room and interact with other Caltech students in-person, which helped me become more a part of the community. The juxtaposition between the loneliness of working on a project which I’m alone in my passion for, and the company of Berkeley students who all have a passion for it, propelled me to go out of my way and find people at Caltech who will help me foster this part of myself and feel less lonely. I believe that they’re out there — I just have to go out of my way to find them. Sitting in my room will not help me feel less lonely and more like I belong with other people at Caltech, but going to other houses and trying to talk with more people will. I made a concrete plan to randomly go to other houses more, at least once a week, because CMM made me realize how valuable these interactions can be.

I’m still not really sure whether working on CMM was net positive or net negative, but I think I’d have done CMM even if it was net negative for me, because I felt like it was my duty since no one else wanted to run it, and it had to be done. I think it’s really hard to tell whether the benefits outweighed the negatives (impact on my mental health and GPA). It’s hard to say for the other CMM volunteers, too. I felt a bit guilty taking time away from the volunteers who really sunk a lot of time into CMM — in particular, the people who worked on the Power Round — because they sacrificed precious time that they probably really wanted to spend on schoolwork. As a result, they probably had to sacrifice sleep which is pretty unfortunate. Interestingly, I don’t feel as guilty about taking time from the Berkeley students because it seemed like they genuinely really wanted to help out and didn’t have a huge tradeoff with schoolwork.

It’s just difficult to run a large competition at a small research-based school I guess, because peoples’ priorities generally don’t align the best with random community- and outreach-related projects. Maybe in the future we’ll need to combine forces with Berkeley and make some sort of CBMT (Caltech Berkeley Math Tournament), because they were an integral reason why we were able to pull through this year, and they are interested in helping out more in the future. I definitely have a lot of careful planning to do in order to survive next year.