Day 1:
After a long plane ride, which had me a little sick near the end, we finally arrived in Boston. I’d been here once before in the summer, but I hadn’t experienced the Northeast cold quite yet. Upon arrival, we met up with pi271828 and VW, the latter I’d never interacted/seen before. I would be rooming with brianzjk, peace09, and VW.

After watching speedyfalcon get swept in Astro Party by brianzjk on the subway, we finally arrived at our hotel. It’s actually pretty nice, and it’s pretty cozy, a break from the harsh cold outside.

We went to Friday Night Events, and I had to skip the estimathon because of an AP Chinese assignment that my mom was really pressing me about. I ended up seeing v_Enhance in the lobby while doing my AP Chinese assignment. In between assignments, I met PotatoMathster and tried to meet GL, to no avail. I also talked to mathleticguyyy for the first time, and he’s both tall and really funny (And nice!). We went to Math Bowl next, and brianzjk was with sub_math, mathleticguyy, and pbj2006. brianzjk and his team absolutely smashed their way through Math Bowl, and highkey swept.

Afterward, I went back to my room, and mathleticguyy came to our room, too, where I continued working on my AP Chinese homework, and finished it by 11:44! We talked about a lot of things, such as contest awards.

Day 2:
After waking up and eating a very healthy breakfast of chocolate milk and cereal, my team (brianzjk, pi271828, peace09, speedyfalcon, KY, JD, and VW) and I went to MIT to take the contest. After grabbing an HMMT frisbee and a water bottle, I sat down while waiting for my teammates to eat breakfast. I ended up talking to PotatoMathster for a little bit, and she introduced me to GL, which was the first time that I’d talked to her irl.

The team round started, and we did pretty well. I ended up contributing/partially contributing to 3 problems, and I felt pretty good about my performance. Then, individual round came. I ended up using all of my last brain power on the first round, Algebra/NT, then crashed on Geo and Combo.

Guts round was much of the same. Before Guts started, I ended up meeting VulcanForge, whom I hadn’t seen since the 2022 State MATHCOUNTS contest. One funny moment was when brianzjk asked VW what the answer to problem 8 was, and VW said “pi over three for eight,” showing that the answer to problem 8 was However, brianzjk sold and wrote down “” as our answer. Our scores ended up being pretty atrocious, but it's alright.

During awards, I met v4913 for the first time in real life, which was really cool. Her team got disqualified because someone named Neal (hopefully I’m spelling this right) is from SF and joined her team, which resulted in them breaking the gerrymandering rule. Honestly, I feel really bad for them because they legitimately had a chance at placing because of their stacked team. v4913 also gave me her HMMT shirt, which is an Adult Small (I'm a Medium) so maybe I'll be wearing a crop top for the first time in my life. Also, babyhamster was called on to join the Acapella group, and some other guy ran onto the stage instead, which caused babyhamster to throw a fit. Immediately, the guy, whose name was Pascal, was told to sit on one of the Acapella people's lap while they sang ily by Surf Mesa to him iirc. I have yet to ask babyhamster whether she thought that Pascal was a blessing in disguise, but she sat down and was very quiet the second Pascal was told to sit on the person's lap.

After playing football with pi271828 (he’s lowkey crazy) both inside and outside, I hung around the SSM team, who was playing Fish (a game that I still do not and wish not to understand). We also got to hear mathleticguyy sing 187 for us, which was inspiring and also amazing! sub_math recorded the entire thing, and hopefully, she posts it on YouTube so I can watch it!

After arriving back at the hotel, our team went to the gym (minus speedyfalcon, JD, and KY]), and we just had some fun, while also complaining about peace09 being so innocent. pi271828 kept saying "boombaclat" repeatedly (or it might be "bombaclat"), which I still have yet to find the definition of.

Day 3:
After laying in bed for around 10 minutes because of how tired I was (staying up till 12:30 am playing bomb party with friends was not the play), I woke up and ate another breakfast of cereal and chocolate milk. brianzjk and VW were still in bed up until 7:15 even though we had to leave with packed suitcases at 7:30 AND peace09 and I had already told them that it was REALLY time to wake up. Our room ended up having everyone else waiting while brianzjk and VW were finishing packing up, and we left for educational activities.

Right before the first lecture started, I played some more football with pi271828, which reaggravated my shoulder issues (rotator cuff tendonitis from swimming), so I had to stop playing. It was pretty fun, though, and pi271828’s ball is really grippy, which helps with catching and throwing.

After a pretty cool diffusion models lecture by Marvin Li, which involved complicated math that I understood for approximately the first half, I decided to go play frisbee with speedyfalcon and KY, since all other teammates were away (in retrospect, I should have invited some other people, but whatever). Because of locked doors, we had to walk around half a mile to get to the field that we wanted to play instead of approximately 50 feet. During the walk there and back, speedyfalcon was vlogging and commentating on our experience, while I was making some lame jokes or something. I’m honestly excited to see what speedyfalcon’s editor (an unpaid friend) cooks up since speedyfalcon recorded a lot of “vlogs” at HMMT. Speaking of vlogs, I saw laura.yingyue.zhang yesterday, and she said “I don’t know” if inquired whether she would vlog the HMMT competition or not. On the way back, speedyfalcon and I sang the Periodic Table song (with pauses and one of us dropping out sometimes because of forgetfulness), which he recorded on his vlog.

I chilled around and worked on making this blog post before going to an origami talk. Funnily enough, ⅔ of the theorems that the lecturer discussed our math club had had a lecture on. Regardless, I found it really cool that you can theoretically build a computer from flat origami and thought that the lecturer, the mathily director, did a very good job of both making the lecture informational and interactive. After the lecture, I talked to v4913 about her performance on individual, and she responded “not great,” to which I responded with “it’s all about the memories we made!” I’m not coping guys! I recall seeing either before or after that conversation that v4913 threw a paper ball at a trash can, and proceeded to not only miss, but the ball (if I recall correctly) entirely missed the trash can and went into the corner of the room behind the trash can, which was unreachable. I thought that was pretty funny, to be honest,

Before leaving, I played more frisbee with speedyfalcon and KY (either I hadn’t yet regrouped with peace09 or he was busy, I forget which). Upon returning, I chilled around with sub_math, mathleticguyyy, and the rest of my team minus pi271828. mathleticguyyy played some tetr.io, which was really cool since he’s very good at the game. Eventually, we had to leave to get our luggage before going to the Boston airport.

The airport was pretty boring, but brianzjk and mathleticguyyy were playing surviv.io with mathleticguyyy doing the shooting and aiming and brianzjk doing the moving. They were lowkey a distraction, since they screamed so loud every time they died after doing well/won. peace09 and I were looking at each other and then laughing when they were being a disturbance since all the other people in our gate were side-eyeing them really hard. Their setup was also really funny since mathleticguyyy was using a folder to pad his mouse, and they were both charging their stuff. I took a picture for brianzjk because he wanted one.
We began to walk around the airport. We ended up buying some boba tea jelly beans, candy corn, and chocolate gummy bears in a bag (to share, and courtesy of brianzjk). I also bought a bag of chocolate-covered blueberries, which I still have yet to finish. Nobody really wanted to eat the candy since it was in a bag, and KY ended up putting some of his cocktail (non-alcoholic but allegedly supposed to taste like alcohol?) jelly beans (If that’s what alcohol tastes like then I’m never drinking alcohol) in the bag. As a last resort offer, because I was forced to hold, and thus eat, the bag of candy, I put them all in a hand and shoved all the candy into my mouth (it was only like a handful, but WOW WAS IT DISGUSTING). Took one for the team, ya’ll. Probably gave myself diabetes in the process haha.

Since our plane was delayed by three hours, our team (and some others) decided to make a new meme number (PLEASE HELP US MAKE IT A MEME NUMBER) because of the guts round funny moment described above. peace09 pulled some problems from his brain and his collection of problems that were unused from WMC. In the end, I don’t think we were very successful, but it is what it is haha.

Overall, I’m really happy with my experience here at HMMT. I met so many people for the first time and even met people whom I had never even talked to before. Many fun memories were made, lots of laughs were shared, information was learned, and new friends were made.

peace09 being innocent compilation:
“I literally had to explain to peace09 what the hood was.” -pi271828
“What does your opps mean” -peace09
“What does ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ mean?” - peace09

EDIT: Forgot to add this, but I met kevinmathzhao and mathicorn while at the place that I saw the SSM team playing Fish.
EDIT: sub_math has sent me the video of mathleticguyyy performing the hit song 187 live! Thanks, sub_math!