Sometimes people ask me how many of my students made the IMO, and if I’m in a bad mood I often give the super snarky reply, “I lost track”.1
That’s actually a white lie. The real answer is “I deliberately don’t keep track”. And in this post I want to explain why.
It’s definitely human nature to be happy when your students succeed, the same way it’s human nature to be happy when your selfies get hearts. In moderation, that seems fine. I think it’s unlikely I ever reach a point where I never brag about OTIS at all.
But there is a fine line between the following two implications:
- “I’m super proud of my kids, look what they did.”
- “I’m super proud of myself, look what my kids did.”
Without naming anyone in particular, I have seen some instances which I felt were clearly on the wrong side of this line.
When done wrong, this violates a lot of my basic principles. I think it’s important that my students “own” their journeys, and I always remind myself contests are ultimately for the students. I think it’s not cool to use students as pawns for public relations.2
As an example of a mistake I made in this direction, in late 2022 I floated the idea of having an OTIS alum survey. I rapidly got feedback this felt super dark-artsy and closed the issue. This probably means I’m doomed to having the occasional “wait, you made IMO?” kind of conversation, but so be it.
Status is an Elder God whose power is consistently underestimated3. So this post is yet another reminder to myself that wanting to help others is different from wanting to be recognized as a person that helps others, and I’ll be the first to admit this is something I still struggle a lot with.
Power Overwhelming 
if students aren’t pawns, why are they so pawn-shaped?
[what if your students did $ACHIEVEMENT not because of you, but in spite of you?]
i’d say the difference between the implications is thick, and that they’re superficially similar because english uses “pride” for both feelings. the first pride might be mudita (the inverse of schadenfreude), and the second pride might be vanity.
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I used to never put student’s achievements on my website. I think it’s ok to put beginner student’s achievement in local competitions on a blog though, as I think that is encouraging. I also think it’s my students who put in the hard work, not me. I’m not a fan of using student’s achievements to advertise oneself. I think professors putting their past PH-D students on their website is ok though.
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I feel like anyone who has achieved anything in their life that brought about some positive change feels the same.
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I completely agree that students need to “own” their journeys, but your framework implicitly assumes a mature contest ecosystem, one where contest math already holds established “intrinsic value.” Think of intrinsic value as the fundamental, underlying worth of an asset that the broader market naturally prices in. In a mature math ecosystem, the market recognizes that these problem-solving skills reliably predict future productivity, translating cleanly into elite college admissions or quantitative finance careers. Because this pipeline is known, the system is self-sustaining: parents are happy to pay for training upfront, and mentors can rely on deferred payoffs (like recruiting highly skilled alumni later).
Growing up in a nascent, entirely self-funded contest math ecosystem, I saw a very different reality. In our early days, this intrinsic value wasn’t recognized yet; the correlation between solving Olympiad puzzles and future economic success was unknown to local institutions. With no structural market reward, the only currency available to sustain the program was pure prestige. To bootstrap any kind of training infrastructure, organizers were practically forced into what I’d call “publicity arbitrage.”
They had to use their top students as pawns for public relations, putting their faces in newspapers or on TV, because that “showbiz” aspect was the only way to secure funding, appease parents, and incentivize mentors to actually stick around. As a shy kid who just wanted to learn math in peace and hated the pressure of interacting with people, I strongly disliked this environment. But pragmatically, without mentors seeking that local clout, students like me would have had absolutely no external support. Leveraging that Elder God of Status is often a necessary, albeit uncomfortable, first step to keep the lights on until an ecosystem’s true intrinsic value can take over.
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