I spent today at HMMT February 2018!

I graded team round solutions 10am to 1pm, took a brief break until 2:30pm for another activity, and then ran a Guts round grading table from 3pm to 5pm with a friend. After watching awards, I went out to dinner around 6pm with the members of the two Minnesota teams and caught up with everyone. That ended around 8pm; I said goodbye to my former teammates and coaches and then walked home across the Charles bridge alone, getting back to my dorm around 8:30pm. (Three times now, I think, I've walked across the Charles, and it's always been alone. I dunno, I just find that interesting.)

The whole experience, it had some complicated emotions.

For one, being able to contribute to HMMT from the other side gave me an appreciation for... mostly its fragility, I suppose. I saw judgment calls being made live which could've been avoided with better preparation and QA, I witnessed my close friends (mostly fellow frosh) being put in big roles that I didn't expect them to fill, and I played roles (sketchy-looking-proof grader! sketchy-looking proof grader! guts round jockey! person who wrote problems that actually made it on the test! ... knower of where the closest bathroom is!) whose former actors I used to revere in high school, because they were in college--not just any college, but MIT!--and so they had to have had it all figured out, right?

So it was fun and a little nerve-wracking to get to help out, although I was probably overthinking it a bit sometimes.

But I have a specific memory in mind. I remember sitting at my Guts round grading table around 3:30pm, in one of the top corners of 10-250, and taking a glance or two during the round at the people on the Minnesota team (when I wasn't busy entering scores, of course), who were sitting pretty far down but who I could just barely see through one of the guide-rails in the aisles of the hall.

And I remember remembering, in that moment, the three years where I was sitting where I was looking, solving problems myself with what was then my team (well, you know, at least partially my team), feeling that awesome adrenaline rush and the sense of prideful achievement whenever I managed to take down a problem that looked so intractable at first glance. I remembered all that, and then I realized that I still really miss all of it.

And that reminded me of a particular conception I'd heard of the afterlife--not any religious conception of the afterlife or whatever, but the D&D afterlife (as portrayed in OOTS, maybe) since I'm a nerd. How you get to be relieved of some of the stresses that you felt in the past (*cough* college apps), and how you get to be closer to more people with similar personalities and interests as you (analogous, perhaps, to alignment in D&D), and how you can do a lot of things that were less accessible to you in the past (like, skip class no, but like, just go out for dinner one night with your friends of your own accord, no special occasion needed; or buy a box of five hundred rubber bands off Amazon since you want to make a bouncy ball and because you can).

But also how your past is somewhat closed off now, including some of the best parts, some of the memories you cherish. And how, although there might be similar-seeming opportunities where you are now, maybe you'll never really be able to feel exactly the same way again.

And that makes me feel really small at times, and pretty sad. Wistful. I don't know how to address it completely.

But I do know that, trying to escape such an inevitability by refusing to leave the past, that won't bring back anything. And I know that there's more cool stuff waiting for me (like, my homework for topology class is actually pretty fun to do!), even if it takes a little effort to find. I guess it was never going to be that easy, anyway.

---

In the interest of finding more cool stuff, I dropped my two dumbest classes (6.041 and 21A.157) and replaced them with more interesting ones (6.006 introduction to algorithms and 9.00 introduction to psychology). I'm happy with these changes, though technically I'm still waiting for the approval of my advisor, who seems to be super slow with email. Ugh.

Also, I'd love to post my solution to this one problem from my homework for 18.901 (topology) once the due date's passed. I really like this one in particular.

Good times!