Whew! Just realized that it has been 1 year since I last wrote something here (for some reason I lost the momentum to write). Here you go, in rough chronological order.

Fall 2020 – Internship with Enlighted

My job titled was ML engineering internship, and I was working mainly on crowd counting in an enclosed space (basically a computer vision problem). There had been a lot of exploration going on in setting up code, debugging, tuning parameter, trying to reproduce some past experimental success that was some how lost.

I eventually noticed that multi-column CNN could work well if your samples come from a fixed background (e.g. collecting data from the same room), and compared it against other algorithms I have surveyed and implemented. One close contender to this was the You-Only-Look-Once algorithm (though more work was required to label the training data). I then delivered a presentation on my findings which attracted attention from some senior employees. That felt pretty good. 🙂

Fall 2020 – #gradapps

Fall 2020 was also the busy time with me devoting most of my spare time to graduate application. I have my resume from job applications that I could just tweak around, there were still a lot more to do:

• My Statement of Purpose took me around 2-3 months to write (and still, if I look back now I might still find places for criticism)
• Looking for a potential advisor also took a lot of research, when there were so many of them and I’d need to narrow down to a few that I think that’s a close research interest match

It really doesn’t help that I was applying for one of the most competitive programs which is CS/ML, where people rate admission into PhD at the top schools as “nearly impossible”. Luckily, the three professors from Waterloo whom I asked for recommendation letters were very helpful and prompt, and I was grateful for that.

Winter 2021 – Online Classes

My Winter 2021 term was my final term of studies at Waterloo, which was also my first and only term of having classes that are completely online. The classes I took were 3 CS (computer vision, AI, concurrent programming), Stats (Applied Linear Model), Econ, and French 101.

That’s also the time I appreciated people’s comment saying “online classes are tough”, mainly because not having classmates / profs around you kinda made you feel like you lost your morale (slightly). The change of grading scheme also made the workload a bit heavier (e.g. the change from final exam to final project, where the latter is substantially more time consuming). Despite being accustomed to taking 6 courses per term, in hindsight I wished I only took 5 in the term.

On the flip side, I can now speak a little French (Je parle un peu français) so my 5 years stay in Canada was no longer a complete waste 😉

April 23, 2021 was the day I submitted my last deliverable for the term, and therefore completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo. Relieved as I was, I had a rather unusual way of ‘celebrating’ (since we can’t go out…quite yet).

Winter 2021 – Graduate Applications Revealed

I started getting invitation to speak with profs about 2-3 weeks after submitting my applications (a.k.a. ‘interviews’), and had a few interviews scheduled throughout January. February was the time where most of my admissions decisions were rolled out. A summary of my admission decisions:

• accepted: MIT, Toronto, Waterloo, UBC, Alberta, UCLA, Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin
• rejected: McGill, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Washington, Cornell, Georgia Tech

I was particularly elated when receiving admission notification from MIT (literally had my mouth opening big and my left hand covering my mouth — don’t worry I did not go out that day so it’s COVID-safe), considering that the admission cycle has been unusually tough given the pandemic, and MIT’s competition was already extremely competitive. I eventually chose MIT’s offer after a few weeks of deliberation. 🙂

Summer 2021 – Internship at Waterfront

It’s summer time and graduate program doesn’t start that soon, so time for another internship! I returned to a former employer, Waterfront International (albeit virtually this time), when I had some fun time setting up my equipment (with a display monitor, a CPU, a modem and a phone!)

I worked on correlation estimation on high frequency intraday returns, and it’s pretty exciting to explore different correlation estimation algorithms from research papers! The discovery on how Kalman Filtering can rectify the problem of underestimation still feels amazing to me (though Kalman filtering was not without its own shortcomings).

Summer 2021 – COVID Injections, Vacation

Everyone hates COVID. Fortunately, I had my two Pfizer doses done by June 2021, and became fully vaccinated come early July.

Ontario opened up in July and my roommates and I travelled to Toronto 2 times for vacation, ranging from going for bicycle trip to spending almost $100 on food over two (high-end) meals in a day. We were happy that we could finally dine in and get out of our home once again.

(I hope this sentiment is not short-lived though, considering that new COVID variants are circulating and we cannot get our guard down yet. I still wear mask regularly now).

Winter / Summer 2021 – Genshin Impact

Okay something not-so-proud to talk about: I was introduced to a game named Genshin Impact during 2020 Christmas, and had been playing that for 8 months (my mum asked me jokingly if I got into any bad activities and I guess gaming was my only answer to that, sorry mum 🙈 jkjk).

I’ll cover more details in a YouTube video (coming very soon!), but it’s definitely well-developed, and it’s addictive. In fact, the way I celebrated my end of school (mentioned earlier) was to spend USD 10 to purchase Battle Pass (a way for you to get more in-game resources). (More like, a #yolo way of rewarding myself after going through 5 years of academic struggle).

All good things must come to an end — I’m at the verge of quitting. I haven’t uninstalled the app only because my friends and I are planning to take an in-game photo together before I leave the game.

Summer 2021 – Time to Say Goodbye!

Finally, it’s end of August and also the time I moved from Waterloo to Boston.

First, taking a flight nowadays was made extra tricky, no thanks to COVID. Taking a COVID test within 3 days of departure (and show the proof that I’m negative) wasn’t a problem, but it still bothers me that I was in an area of high exposure risk (i.e. airports and airplanes), where I was physically with people who could be from everywhere (and the airplane was operating at full capacity 🤦‍♂️). I vividly remembered my mum describing my journey as a war — this description couldn’t have been more appropriate at this time.

Second, the process of moving itself was also somewhat onerous. I have moved a few times, but thanks to storage services (e.g. Youpackwestore) and that I was only moving between Toronto and Waterloo at most, things were easier. The fact that I was moving everything from Waterloo to Boston made this task significantly harder, especially given the airline baggage restrictions (I weighed my luggages at least 10 times at home, I swear). I ended up discarding around 35% of my belongings (mainly old clothes and items that I donated into a Diabetes Canada donation box). Fun fact: this is also the time I first experienced shipping a box internationally where I need to beware of custom regulations.

Rant aside, I was grateful that the whole moving process went rather smoothly (and my COVID tests after landing at MIT were all negative!)

Summer / Fall 2021 – A New Chapter

Nothing much to say yet, but the orientation program was pretty enjoyable overall. It blew my mind that we can have dinner together in a big group outdoors when I have been extremely cautious about having meals together with friends of different households in the past. I have also been exploring the Boston/Cambridge area…before the real work (as a graduate student) starts soon.

“Wait, it has been four years?”

The day when I waved goodbye to my parents to study in Canada on September 1, 2016 still seemed to be fresh — as if it was only last year, or even yesterday. I was in my first CS class as the professor talked about the 2016 US Presidential Election prediction; now the world is heading for another one.

It’s inconceivable to think of how much things have been embedded in these 4 years: the changing seasons that saw me dreading the winter and can’t wait for the next summer (unfortunately I still can’t stay comfortable with the Canadian winter); missing my family so badly that I couldn’t hide my excitement when I finally booked a ticket back home last summer; moving around different places every 4-8 months that I officially lost count on the money I paid for storage and moving; picking up the Canadian hobbies like skiing and skating; immersing myself in the academic rat race of assignments and exams for 7 study terms (1 more left and I’m gonna graduate!); interning in fields that span graph theory, cryptography, machine learning, finance, databases; experiencing the once-in-a-century pandemic (oh well…). All these happened in a blink of an eye.

It wasn’t like that before. When I was 8, 4 years later means I would have “levelled-up” into a teenager who could basically do many things himself and don’t have to listen to his parents (jk that’s so delusional LOL). As a kid, this turned out to be hard for me to wait for. Later in 2010, I involved in mathematical Olympiad for 4 years that culminated in my gold medal win in IMO 2014. An arduous uphill journey with unknowns on how things turn out, but the joy derived from mathematical problem solving made the time flew by without me noticing.

Perhaps it’s a wake up call for yet another reminder on how transient our lives are, that we can’t be afford to be careless and let 4 years slip away.

For some time I doubted if I am still going to write about the process of writing a math contest, but since I need some effort to revive this writing page…here it is! (Warning: this is gonna be long)

Session A

Part 1 – the warm up

As usual the strategy is to start from the easy problem so I looked at A1, which, unfortunately, wasn’t that easy at its first glance beyond the fact we can factorize the expression into (A+B+C) x (sq(A-B) + sq(B-C) + sq(A-C))/2 (where sq means the square function), which means if A=B=C=0 we get a 0. A few more experimentation: substituting (1, 0, 0) and (1, 1, 0) means we get the value of 1 and 2, respectively. This isn’t taking me anywhere…let’s try A2. Turns out, A2 was quite routine (I was a trigonometry-trick enthusiast back in the IMO times, remember?) To make things more systematic:

1. Notice that the incenter I cuts the angle bisector from C into 2:1,
2. Drop the perpendicular from I to AB to make good use of the arctan condition,
3. Draw parallel to AB from C that intersects the perpendicular line above at D, calculate AD based on the angle beta (double tangent angle formula needed here)
4. Finish off by concluding that alpha = 90 degree

There goes A2 and time to revisit A1. Remember the factorization earlier on? That wasn’t in vain as it turns out: if we make the some of square stay constant at 1 (achievable whenever (A, B, C) are either (k, k, k+1) or (k,k+1, k+1) then we have all the cases for 3k+1 and 3k+2. This idea inspires another solution of 9k via (k-1, k, k+1) and we could just finish off by showing that this expression must be divisible by 9 OR cannot be divisible by 3 (though I should have shown that it must be nonnegative — reason why I lost 2 marks).

Part 2 — strategy and decision

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds because the next candidate wasn’t clear. A6 was out, A4 (differential geometry) wasn’t well under my radar (I was convinced that the answer was no, but no obvious counterexample popped into my mind), so the only clear choices are A3 and…A5? Yet there wasn’t a clear strategy on how to tackle A3 either (for god’s sake how is this an A3?) The only way I could get out from was to invoke AM-GM inequality (M_1)^(2019) >= b_(0)/b_(2019) >= 1/2019 (i.e. this will practically be our lower bound, lol).

There was only around 1 hour and 30 minutes left, so I took a flight instead of a fight and glanced at A5. I tried p=3 (ans=1), p=5 (ans=2) so it looks like the answer has to be (p-1)/2 using the fact that:

1. The i-th derivative of x^k is k(k-1)…(k-i+1)x^(k-i)
2. The highest power of n with (x-1)^n dividing q(x) is the biggest possible M such that q(1), q'(1), …, q(M-1 derivative)(1) are all 0.

But I wasn’t too sure about 2 as it works only for the complex field: who on earth have the expertise on a finite field?!?!?! Chill man…we could very well just verify that: turn out we are all good as long as n < p because (x-1)^p has derivative 0 in prime field. That’s it: for the i-th derivative evaluated at 1 we will just take the following sum:

a_k k(k-1)…(k-i+1)=k^((p+1)/2)(k-1)…(k-i+1)

for k = 1, …, p-1. Finally we remind ourselves that this is a sum of b_i(1^i+…+(p-1)^i), which is divisible by p unless the exponent i is divisible by p-1 (hint: primitive root). Therefore the maximum i we can permit is (p-3)/2 (and therefore the answer is (p-1)/2).

Cool, back to A3. We got the previously-mentioned inequality, we need |z| to be the same for all the roots. There’s how we got the inspiration:

x^(2019)+…+x+1=(x^(2020)-1)/(x-1)

so all roots have size 1. So all it needs to make z=Mx (or is it x/M? Whichever works) and we’re done.

(There’s no part 3, 30 minutes left and I think I better check my work instead of trying A4 or A6).

 

Session B

Part 1: Settle the easy ones first

Contrary to Session A, I looked at the second one (B2) first. The structure of the denominator suggests the use of partial fraction, why not give it a try? And we need the formula:

sq(cos A) – sq(cos B) = (cos A – cos B) (cos A + cos B)

= 4(sin (A+B)/2)(cos (A+B)/2)(sin (B-A)/2)(cos (A-B)/2)

=sin(A+B)sin(B-A)

so each term now becomes 1/sin(pi/2n)(1/sq cos(k pi/2n) – 1/sq cos((k-1) pi/2n)) which gives the convenient telescoping sum, yielding 1/sin(pi/2n)(1/sq(sin pi/2n)^2 – 1) and therefore the limit 8/pi^3 (just take sin(pi/2n) as pi/2n )

Back to viewing B1. It makes an intuitive sense on how to proceed by trying small cases (use infinite descent to show that the points are all in the form (2^m, 2^m), (2^m, 0), (0, 2^m) with its negatives), and I’m 99% sure that the square must either be axis-aligned or have 45 degree difference but proving that became a total nightmare (The most straightforward way is to brute force using “same length” and “perpendicular” criteria but…uh…nobody got time for that).

Part 2: Fight or flight? 

Desperate, I looked at the other problems (3-6) but none seemed too easy (in hindsight it was a mistake not to try B6 since it turned out to be easy). A few scribbling on B3 took me nowhere, so I decided to give B5 a go via small cases (replacing N=1008 with N=2, for example), which gives the next value (after 1, 2, 5) as 10 (because the difference of polynomial degree n is a polynomial degree n – 1), And hey, why can’t we apply the idea to the general case N=1008? What follows is a lot of writing in justifying this argument, finding an expression, and finally, simplifying into what’s required by the problem (which turned out to be F_{2N+2}-F_{N+2}). This last step required a bit of investigation but not too hard after some pattern finding and proof by induction.

Having done B5, the only sensible thing is to revisit B1. It’s an honest struggle, at best, but I finally came up with an argument: if we rotate by 45 degree and shrink It by a factor of sqrt(2) then we’re basically reducing all points from P_n to P_{n-1} and therefore we can continue doing this until at least one point is in P_0 (excluding the origin). Manual check + parity argument means there are only 5 such configurations, and therefore f(n)-f(n-1)=5 for all n. Elegant idea, but my writeup was messy that I was kinda disbelieved to receive a 10/10.

Part 2.1: the final struggle

The last 30 minutes should better be devoted to the problem that I have the strongest feeling about: B3. At this point I couldn’t remember much but all I could remember writing on the solution sheet was pure gibberish . Times up. I gave up.

—

I have to admit — the past months have been hectic due to schoolwork and a part time research project, which explains why this site has been dormant for a whooping 6 months (or is it just a cover-up of the fact that I lack writing inspiration?) The fact that I’m not attending school (physically) should then mean that I better get my writing muscles on again, so here we go as a warm up:

1. The COVID-19 pandemic that dominated the headlines of my news feed affects every single one of us: in particular, universities suspend in-person teaching and students are to continue their studies online. While the restructuring of the course outlines implies a significantly slower pace of workload, we’re all overwhelmed by the immense uncertainties amid keeping ourselves abreast of the current situation that evolves rapidly.

   Endless monitoring on the official site aside, we students need to cope with the many things that will no longer go along with our plan (e.g. the cancellation of a scheduled GRE test), the adjusted routine that minimizes the frequency of leaving my hostel, and more important, the well-being of people around us (friends, families, and ourselves). It’s only wise if I can use this opportunity to do things that I almost never have a chance to do regularly (like reading), and figure out the directions of my life (academia vs industry, math vs CS) that has been abandoned in the middle of schoolwork.

2. Adding to the previous point: I originally have an internship lined up in the States but the travel ban imposed by both Canada and US necessitates some change in this plan (as minimal as “working remotely”, hopefully). I’m not alone. We’ll have to wait for things to unfold for the weeks to come.
3. Fall 2019 term. The beginning of the term saw me pulling two all-nighters for the 2019 Hack the North, which I wowed to be the last hackathon that I would pour all my soul in for more than 24 hours in a row. Due to the part time research and the heavy nature of one course (Operating System), I reduced my course load from the my 6 to 5 (though a friend said “come on 5 is the usual not 6!” 🤣). I did well in those courses, those in retrospect I wish I spent more time to actually understand the content of certain courses instead of finding the “most efficient” way to gain good marks, and to produce more for my research during that period.

   

4. Winter 2020 term (to-date). My part time research continues, and I think I did better with better direction and knowledge in machine learning (though the output still fell short of what’s required to make a conference submission, alas). I think I enjoyed the courses better than last term’s, though it might have to do with the theoretical and mathematical nature of the courses too.
5. Contests. I have to admit I’m getting increasingly less obsessed with math and programming contests (there’re other more important things like school, jobs and research, aren’t they?), but I’d do it for the pure sake of having fun. Without intensive practice, I probably won’t see a phenomenal increase on my Codeforces rating for time being like what happened over the 2018 summer (in fact I can’t even secure the orange rating right now ). The miracle of doing well on the 2018 Waterloo ACM locals and ECNA regionals did not re-occur in 2019 either. I’m simply happy, though, to score another Honorable Mention on the 2019 Putnam competition, with a respectable ranking. 😀

   

6. Activities. Currently, travelling has become a luxury. This makes the 2019/20 Boston vacation more memorable where I finally checked off the MIT/Harvard visit off my bucket list and enjoy the great seafood over there! (More details on vlog, stay tuned!) Earlier in the term I had the pleasure to travel to Ottawa and Gattineau park, and this winter (before COVID-19 became a pandemic) I visited a local ski resort at Waterloo as part of my indulgence for winter activities.

   

TL;DR the past 6 months were great, thanks to the people around me: research project colleagues, the Data Science club execs (including both the activities and socials), Malaysian society for the informal potluck and end-of-term celebrations, and several schoolmates that I’ve known since the start of my undergrad. Now it might be in our best interest to stay away from each other physically and connect via electronic media to practice #socialDistancing

Writing stuff has always been enjoyable. Unfortunately, it has been relegated to the bottom of my to-do list ever since I started my undergrad here (with the exception of Summer 2017 period when I had more free time). This is the only thing I could do to rectify this situation: the update before school starts.

1. I’m back from a month-long summer break in Malaysia! Thanks to my co-op program at Waterloo, summer break really isn’t a thing for me as all school breaks are at most 2 weeks in length. Getting home is therefore rendered impractical considering the time and money spent on the flight. This time, though, I had a month off this time (thanks to my employer for the flexibility in adjusting my work term length!), so I seized the opportunity to go home. Being able to spend time with my family, catch up with some old friends, and relish in the local food made every second spent in my city worthwhile, and this one month would be one of the most memorable moments in my undergrad life.
2. Summer in Toronto had been amazing, replete with activities and entertainment ranging from watching the live Raptor’s show in the bar and watching the victory parade, to cycling around the Toronto island or simply jogging around the town. My summer internship had been an enriching one — now I have a better sense of how working at a trading firm would look like.
3. Hobbies — I lost the penchant to do a complete writeup on the process of me solving the IMO (simply because I had retired from the participation in this contest for a good 5 years), but I do have my solutions uploaded here (first time having 6 problems solved, though problems 3 and 6 are probably considered out-of-contest-time solutions and I only got problem 3 after reading some comments on AoPS). Solutions to other contests are also in the same repo, just to showcase my love for math Olympiad 😉 .

   Codeforces — this is the only competitive programming that I’m actively doing till now. Until last August, I had been steadily marching from cyan / blue to purple rating (except a downfall), surpassing the purple bar with an astonishing 35th place on a Division 2 contest. The journey to the next rating band (orange) steepened significantly after that, however (despite it’s being only < 150 points away) with me hovering between 1953 to 2014 rating points consistently for the next 10 contest, only to breakthrough with a lucky #75 later on before crawling slowly to scrap by the orange bar. Regardless of how long I can maintain this, I am happy to unlock this achievement, at least for once.

   

4. How about school? “Oh no I haven’t gone to school for 8 months!” While this is not the correct way to convey this fact, but it’s true. I will be starting my Fall study term in two days (after 7 months of internship + 1 month of vacation), so stay tuned!

That’s all, for now. 🙂

Just face it — time flies, and it’s the end of April of the year 2019. Following UWaterloo’s calendar, this also signifies the Winter 2019 term has reached the end. In the past two years, this brought me the relief of finishing yet another academic year, especially in 2017 when the internship search and academic workload have been tumultuous. Consequently, the new non-academic life style in Spring has always been something I was looking for. Now, instead of celebratory, there’s a sense of emptiness lurking in my heart. The previous anticipation of the end of the April final exam season has since been replaced by the reluctance to accept the fact that the term was really over.

Contrary to the past Winter terms, I spent my term interning in the Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group. The learning curve at each research internship just got steeper each time, with this me facing a brand new challenge this time: machine learning. Amid the rewarding experience of learning something completely new, there’s always the self-doubt of where I’m working hard enough to contribute meaningfully to this internship. There were so much to be done that my coworkers actually described 4 months as too short; it’s only towards the end of the term did I feel it — I was ultimately swarmed by the ambivalence of both the excitement by the new interesting direction and opportunities the project was leading to, and the anxiety that time was running out. How I wished there were more time to work on it!

Several coding explorations filled the first half of my Winter term, ranging from algorithmic (CommuniTech Code & Win, and the Terminal AI challenge) to hackathons (Hack the Valley, Acorn Talent, and LunarHacks). Excited by the prospect of these hacking opportunities and the free weekends from the co-op terms, I turned myself into these hackathons with the intent to learn skills needed for application development. These five programming contests / activities were tinged with the nights we pulled our lethargic selves for all-nighters just to get stuff done, shivers as we were racing against the submission deadline to add our desired features, and the hilarious moments when we had to package our project as if it’s something “useful” during the pitching session. Eventually, I came to the point of deciding that I should halt these intensive exploration and focus on ML- or algorithmically-related aspects of CS. Nonetheless, the time luxury that made these explorations possible was something I would always appreciate. (Note: I travelled to Portugal as a supporter of the Waterloo’s ACM-ICPC team at the World Finals event, but I will save this to a later post I guess. 🙂 )

The winter term was the first time I broke myself away from the tranquil university town (Waterloo) to a metropolitan that accommodates one-sixth of Canada’s population (Toronto). Interns event (Escape Room and Axe Throwing) by ATG aside, the vibrant Toronto atmosphere incentivized me to self-explore several places, ranging from the repeated visits to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra performance and the skating rinks, to several winter-exclusive events like the Light Festivals. Other times, strolling around the downtown area itself (when weather permits) or inside the Eaton centre served just in time to take a break from exhausting my brain after a day of work, or simply a gruelling Codeforces contest. Roaming around the city definitely became easier with weather turning warmer, but the winter-exclusive activities like skating and the light festivals, and the Toronto winter vibes in general, remain the moments that I wish I could live again.

With a few months left in Toronto before heading back to Malaysia for vacation, I hope to seize the opportunity to relish in the urban atmosphere where the weather is welcoming enough to make people stay outdoors. Nevertheless, this winter term will most likely be one-of-a-kind experience throughout my undergraduate journey, and will therefore be deeply ingrained in my memories. 🙂

Ps: thanks to my hangout buddy (schoolmate / friend who happened to be in Toronto with me in the term) for joining me for the in-city travel, and dragging me to places in return!

 

It’s Pi Day again, which reminds me of the MIT decision date (I always loved enjoying their decision trailer because it’s incredibly entertaining. One thing I couldn’t help thinking of, however, was what would happen if I were to choose MIT on April 30 three years ago? I still remember the Pi Day when I logged into decisions.mit.edu, thrilled at the sentence “it’s our pleasure to offer you…”, yet an awkward ambivalence arose when I sensed that I wasn’t likely to commit to MIT (and no, I didn’t choose MIT, obviously).

This thought led me to the whirlwind of memory lane between December 2015 and August 2016: arguably one of the best moments I have in life. Just fresh from completing my A-Levels exam, I was on full course to complete my university application processes: the Regular decision of US colleges, and several others in Hong Kong and Canada. I was first threw a surprise admission offer by Princeton, then by Cambridge and MIT itself (on the Pi Day!), along with some full scholarship offer at other colleges. It feels like hard work from the IMO, A-Levels and SAT preparation that together took me years to prepare finally paid off, and the power is with me to make a choice.

Thereafter, gone were the days of idling (beyond teaching math Olympiad and picking up programming), and I were set to attend Waterloo. The romanization of life in another continent, and the warm Residence Welcome video stole my hype for this Canadian university. Only after settling down here did I realize the stress piling up when exams and interviews started, and the fantasy started transformed into anxiety. Perhaps this made me think of the same question again: how would I be if I were to be placed in MIT (or similar)?

It’s been three years, and however stressful life at Waterloo could be, I am grateful that the rigorous curriculum in math and computer science, and also the internship program made me a person that I want to be (though, there’s still a long way to go). And all these are attributable to the people around me — being in an environment where people around you are working on improving they appearance on resume definitely motivated me to work hard on that. On a not-so-serious remark, choosing a school in Canada also enabled me to blend into the life of the Canadians, ranging from embracing the Canadian hobbies (like skating and skiing) to simply exploring the cities and neighbourhoods around me. Perhaps, the only thing I would long for is the balance between a tech-focused environment and a multi-disciplined interests like humanities and physical sciences: something I did in the A-Levels and worked hard on (Physics and Economics). And this is something I envision to be something the Ivies look seriously on.

“Stay well and thrive”, a note to self as I continue along the Waterloo journey (which was also something I wrote three years ago).

Context: the 10-year-challenge campaign started by Facebook .

The craze for this 10-year challenge among my friend circle became evident as I scroll through Facebook or Instagram wall. The vicarious fun of entertaining oneself of the contrast between numerous pairs of before-and-after photos almost attracted me to join the squad, only to be held back by my self-conscience of preventing myself from being to obsessed with being present unnecessarily on social media. Nevertheless, in this writing space that’s more personal, it’s worth reflecting what had happened to me over the last 10 years.

Perhaps it’s such a coincidence, Jan 2009 was also the time I entered my middle school: the so-called elite high school in my hometown. This ‘status upgrade’ and the simplistic mindset in me gave me an illusion that the value of “following parents’ order” that Chinese have held sacrosanct doesn’t have to be followed closely; I should be now entitled with my own thoughts. While puberty gave me the audacity to speak out my thoughts, disagreements and demands, it failed to install me the skills to professionally voice them and to exercise my discretion on knowing what to do. This explains why I thought it’s okay to relentlessly query people about their marks: for the purpose to gauge my class ranking under the competitive (and somewhat toxic) environment, without knowing that these numbers could be privacy or taboo to people. Fast forward to college, I became way more well-received among my classmates. Being in the cohort of like-minded folks definitely helped; other than that, it’s only because I only learned how to interact with people at the age of 18. Perhaps that’s also why Prof. Arsmah (the former Malaysian IMO chairperson) texted me “You have grown up” along with a reunion photo in 2016, as compared to 2011 when she insisted me to tell her myself on how did the IMO go — “to improve your communication skills”, she said.

One lucky thing happening to me in the first half of the 10 years was the discovery of who I am: someone who loves math. If not because of the opportunity to get into the IMO training camp, I wouldn’t realize that I can spend my thoughts on a single math problem for a few hours just to taste the sense of accomplishment after solving it. Amid my practice of math problems and following the IMO training regime, alchemy happened as I advanced into the IMO team: something my parents and I thought it was impossible given the fierce competition in the selection process. That’s when math problem solving, turned from merely an exploration to a commitment and a habit. This habit perpetuated beyond the 2011 IMO despite being severely hit by the failure, even though it wasn’t clear if the hard work and sacrifice was worth it. Fortunately, achievements came along with my continuous practice, and my IMO career ended with the pinnacle: one and the only gold medal in IMO 2014. My full scholarships from Waterloo and HKUST, and the acceptances into other elite universities definitely served as great rewards and ramification to my achievements before, but what’s more heartening was the immense comfort before most pure math courses in Waterloo — simply because I have the motivation to deal with them.

The second half of the 10 years saw me entering the A-Levels programme, which also saw how my dreams were shaped. As glamorous as it sounds, the Malaysian IMO ‘ancestors’ often ended up in great colleges like Oxbridge and the Ivies, so I thought I would be the same as them one day. But it’s not until the college application period did I realize that I had to earn the respect of the admission officers through means other than the IMO. Luckily, my bursary from the SPM (Malaysian Education Certificate) also placed me to mix closely with people with the similar mind, sharing the similar dream: to get into one of the top 20 universities. For the first time, my motivation to work hard came from something other than merely to make my transcript look beautiful. For the first time, I became able to think of what I wanted to pursue in the future, and what were my areas of interest (and not-so-interest). The admission offers from 11 universities justified my hard work, eventually. But what’s matter was how the process shaped me into someone who’s dare to be more productive to chase for his dream.

The last quarter of the 10 years span was spent in the university, which was what I called the pivotal point of my life. In September 2016, I left behind people around me to embrace a new environment, in a new country, with new set of people around me. It’s this environment that I picked up programming and tuned myself towards a better self when comes to the WaterlooWorks Hunger Games period. It’s this place that I saw the weather around me turning from green to red to white, before turning green again. As I braved through the unprecedented challenge of job hunting season, I started realized what differentiates myself as a student and as a person: someone who doesn’t vs does care about skills other than those needed to get the good grades. The struggle to mould myself to someone who’s ready to contribute to the industry while still maintaining the other aspect of my life (school and work-life balance) gradually prepared me for the challenges I may face upon the adulthood, which is also a step towards maturity.

With that, what would happen in the next 10 years?