Jason's USABO Experience: Freshman Year, Part 1

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Early Years

I suppose the most appropriate place to start is how I even learned about the USABO.

I’d always shown a lot of interest in STEM as a child, reading tons of science books from the library every week, and my parents had lofty dreams for both me and my older brother. In middle school, they encouraged him to compete in Math competitions like Mathcounts and AMC8/10, and seeing as he was pretty good, then later me as well.

I wouldn’t say I was terrible, but I just didn’t find competition math that interesting at the time. My true love had always been biology.

As a child, I watched a lot of nature documentaries, and to this day, I still credit them with sparking my love for biology and evolution. I remember back in 3rd grade, I stumbled upon Hank Green’s Crash Course Biology and watched the whole series out of curiosity.

Honestly, I probably didn’t understand like 80% of the content at the time, but it cemented my love for bio at a young age. 

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Freshman Year, Part 1

Fast forward a few years and I first heard about USABO through Science Olympiad in 8th grade. Originally under the naive impression (of parents in my area) that the road to a good school like MIT was only through math competitions, it was exciting to think that there was my own path, that all my interest in Bio wasn’t just a curiosity anymore. I set my goals very high, hoping to make camp by my Junior year, and I started studying the summer before 9th grade.

To current highschoolers, I’d say not to worry. While I’ve heard some students nowadays start studying as early as middle school, I think my starting point was neither particularly early nor too late. And while there is a lot of content in USABO, I think studying for 1-2 years is sufficient.

In 2020, I took the inaugural class of Baology, Season 1 Session 1. As (basically) a middle schooler, it was honestly pretty intimidating at first. 

1. Like most kids, I had never actually read a textbook from cover to cover before. I didn’t have any study strategies and the sheer volume of content was scary.

2. The competition structure of USABO seemed daunting at first. Coming from the world of competition math, where cutoffs are somewhat more lenient and there’s ample chance to prove oneself, the seemingly massive canyon between 1000 semifinalists and only 20 finalists was discouraging.

   • To those of you from competitive regions like California, NoVa, Texas, or New York, I’m sure there’s talk about campers in various olympiads from your area every year. But I was from a less competitive area where even USAMO was a huge accomplishment that the WeChat moms would talk about for years, and we’d practically never heard of someone “camping”.

   • Whereas AMC had many tiers (AMC→AIME→USAMO→MOP) with hundreds of qualifiers even at higher levels, the sharp cutoff of USABO left me worried that I could never progress beyond semis. 

This seemingly massive hurdle was something that truly weighed on me for many months. Granted, this was only because I had set my goals so high from the start.

I started off with eager passion and curiosity, but even halfway through the course, I started finding the material too hard. This was definitely a “skill issue” on my part, though.

The original version of the course only had one level for all students, both beginners and more advanced students. Now that there’s two levels, I think this is one of the biggest improvements in the course, smoothing out the learning curve for students who are just starting off and need the guidance most.

USABO is a marathon, not a sprint. I always says this and it could not be more true. Coming from a competition math background, where skills and problem-solving may come intuitively to the gifted, there is a lot less of that in USABO. Practically everyone comes in without any knowledge, and everyone starts as a noob.

Studying for USABO wasn’t as easy as I thought (you’re telling me I get to study the subject I actually like and I can just read my way into MIT?) I put my USABO journey on hold (maybe indefinitely), and I honestly think I just rotted for my first semester of 9th grade.