Calling all high school juniors! We’re proud to announce a new educational service to accompany last year’s ⛵IS: Evan’s Chen’s Elite Cutting-Edge College Essay Consulting & Editing Center! Abbreviated (EC)⁵. Why trust Evan? Evan Chen is one of the leading names in admissions to elite American colleges. Students that Evan has mentored have gone on… Continue reading (EC)⁵: College Essay Consulting
Category: Personal Life
The depth of Hanabi
This post is a short chrono-logue about my time with the card game Hanabi, which I play with the H-group. Thus, it’s also implicitly an advertisement for why I enjoy the game Hanabi so much. I think the progression is a bit interesting because it can be divided into almost discrete “stages”, with each stage… Continue reading The depth of Hanabi
Slice of life of the OTIS GM
Here’s a snapshot of what running OTIS looks like these days. Starts from last Sunday afternoon until Monday lunch. Timestamps indicate when the action was completed (rather than started). Sunday 13:04: Process a late financial aid request from someone who forgot to request it earlier. Sunday 13:14: Edit OTIS website to clarify that if you… Continue reading Slice of life of the OTIS GM
Things to tell 18-year-old Evan
Early in 2023 the MIT Undergraduate Math Association had an event where course 18's could get paired with a graduate student and chat over coffee. So naturally I got asked what I wish I knew as an undergraduate. This post records some subset of the things I said. Undergraduate math isn't deep after all ---… Continue reading Things to tell 18-year-old Evan
Announcing ⛵IS, the successor to OTIS
It’s with a sense of both sadness and excitement that I am writing to announce that year IX of my math olympiad training program, OTIS, is cancelled. Instead, it will be replaced by a new program that I am starting, named Boat Operations: A Tutorial In Sailing, or ⛵IS for short. This was a hard… Continue reading Announcing ⛵IS, the successor to OTIS
Everything I need is on the ground
For me the biggest difference between undergraduate math and PhD life has been something I've never seen anyone else talk about: it's the feeling like I could no longer see the ground. To explain what this means, imagine that mathematics is this wide tower, where you start with certain axioms as a foundation, and then… Continue reading Everything I need is on the ground
Mystery Hunt 2023
This is a retro-post for the Mystery Hunt 2023, for which I played a somewhat minor role on the organizing team (teammate). You can play at interestingthings.museum. There is an ongoing list of write-ups about the hunt being kept at puzzles.wiki, and you may also be interested in the reddit AMA from teammate. Puzzle shoutout… Continue reading Mystery Hunt 2023
The silver lining
A while ago someone asked me how COVID had affected the students I worked with. I replied that, on average, the pandemic had tripled my students' productivity. And I'm gonna brag about it like the proud teacher I am.
OTIS: The RPG
I went and took the idea in I switched to point-based problem sets one step further this year. Now the OTIS-WEB page looks like this: Makes it feel a bit more rewarding to complete problem sets, I think. Also gives me the chance to plant easter eggs everywhere, which is always a lot of fun… Continue reading OTIS: The RPG
I reserved a Steam Deck!
I might be going too far with this Arch Linux brand loyalty, but I am so psyched I don't care. There's three pieces of hardware that I've always kind of wanted but never been willing to spend money on in isolation: A handheld gaming consoleA laptop with a touch screenA laptop with enough power to… Continue reading I reserved a Steam Deck!
Power Overwhelming 