Sooooo I'm now officially in the 5th day of winter break (which technically started the day after exams). The past few days included a mix of things - my grandma, who I've slept and ate under the same roof with for the past 5 years, is now diagnosed as terminal with cancer. As I've been extremely tired (around 4 hours of sleep per day oops), I'll keep this post fairly straightforward and simple.

The atmosphere in my family right now is extremely tense - my aunts and my dad going to the hospital to and fro everyday. For convenience's sake, we're now living in our original city center department, which my dad and I moved out of in the middle of my sophomore year so I can live next to the school.

As a result, I'm pretty much on my own everyday. For the past few days, an increasing amount of time has been spent at the local university - Jiaotong (one of the best in China), which is right across street. The self-study rooms, in particular, are rooms that students (and outside people) can choose to go to to silently study. I feel they are are strangely inspirational - after all, it's hard not to be productive when everyone around you are, from morning to night. Apart from a few awkward glances I received for being the only person in the room reading English books as well as the many cute and distracting college girls, I've felt it a good place to study - math or SAT.

My primary concern this winter break is to maximize my chances of making USAMO. I've felt ambivalent towards pouring too much time into olympiad-math topics, esp. as my latest AIME score have really gotten into me, and for olympiad problems in general, being frustrated and stressed has decreased my ability to solve problems in general.

Therefore, I'm going to try my best to bulldoze my way through the final problems of as much AIMEs and AMC12s as I can - I really, really, really, really don't want to have to worry about NOT making USAMO when second semester starts. A USAMO score of 14 seems even further off - while the non-geo P1s of 90s and early 00s USAMOs are mostly easy, for some reason I haven't been able to independently (without some form of hint) solve a single non-geo USAMO P4 after the couple of USAMOs (1996-1999) I've run through. This makes me excessively worried on one hand, not in the fact that my ability level hasn't reached that of an old USAMO P4, but because I, for some reason, can't devote a long stretch of time (as in 1-2 hours undisturbed) to THINK about a problem that's just slightly outside my comfort zone. In particular, I worry about spending too much time on olympiad problems when I could be spamming AMC 12s or AIMEs or SATs (my highest in the last few days has been 710, which is at least 20 points lower than my goal for January). In general, I'm extremely disappointed in my stamina. For example, after 3 hours of nonstop concentration in the WOOT AIME, I felt so tired I couldn't even finish an SAT reading section afterwards.

Any advice on this?