It's 5: 13 AM as I'm starting to type this (I woke up early cause jet lag), less than 3 hours before the first bell rings, and with that, ends my summer.

In terms of math, my scratch work (pages of A4 paper, back to back filled) stands at just less than 4.5 cm. The bottom half (that is, the 5 weeks of summer) consists of problems from 101 (around 50+ of them), 102 (around 30+), 104 (the entire theory section and 40 problems in), 106 (finished), 108 (around 60 problems in), the (almost) entirety of Interm CP challenge problems, a few AIME final 5's, 2 or 3 chapters of ACoPS, almost all the problems from the first 4 chapters of EGMO, the homework/class/message board problems from Olympiad Geo, a few JMO/AMO problems, and of course... 3 full note books filled with problems from AMSP!

In other words, I chased A LOT of angles, inducted (sometimes strongly, other times not so much), took the inverses of a lot of residues mod n, checked the irreducibility of quite a few polynomials, spotted some tricky one-to-one correspondences, did some p-adic evaluation and identities involving floor/ceilings and cause why not, tried P5 USAMO this year, derived some well-known results involving partitions via generating functions, got introduced to Ramsey numbers, applied Sylvester on other extremal arguments on some combinatorial geo problems, applied AM-GM/Cauchy in totally mind-blowing ways, derived lemmas involving pedal triangles and isogonal conjugates, and much, much more...

It was also a summer of personal grit and determination, miles and miles down highway to success every night, nothing but my own will (and the soprano voice of Taeyeon and the mindless rap of G-Dragon!) to propel me every step forward. I've lost around 8 KG overall this summer (I actually lost 1-2 KG from AMSP, which came as a surprise after all the curly fries, beef burgers, and soda), which brings my weight a solid 12 KG below my peak weight at around this time last year.

While many may think I'm just obsessed with girls and am doing this to increase my charisma or something, the fact is, none of the girls in my school are hot enough chasing girls doesn't even crack the top 25 priority list in terms of my junior year priorities.

Along side WOOT, a large collection of olympiad-level books, and the contest pages on AoPS which will consist of my training regime, the PSAT is coming up in 2 months (and I aspire to be a national merit scholar), all the meanwhile handling 5 AP-level classes (one is multivariable calculus). But the true challenge lies in the months of Feb - June, aka the darkest months in the tunnel -- AMC training, AIME, USAMO, AP exams, GPA, SAT I, SAT subject tests, applications to Math Camp/PROMYS, etc.

In many ways, my (sort of) success with toning down my weight the past year is just a reaffirmation that I can achieve whatever I want, that I am the only person who can alter my destiny for the good or the bad.

In addition, AMSP has shed light on me that there exists a tightly-knit elite community of problem solvers in the US who have the same goals/values as me, and this fact comforts me in ineffable ways. What doesn't however, is the fact that there're 6th graders who already qualified for JMO/AMO, rising freshmen (many!) already having their eyes on MOP spots in Red/Green for next year, and many rising junior MOPers destined for Blue. My grandiose goals of MOP and MIT seem afar and distant, esp. in a school in Shanghai in which not a single AMO qualifier has ever been produced.

But nevertheless, I'm coming for you guys. Wait for me at the end of the tunnel.

Now it's 6 AM... I should probably get out of bed and get dressed. Junior year? Psh. I'mma bring the house down.