All the way back in 8th grade I had to write a “time capsule” for myself when I was about to graduate High School - I chose to make it as a scheduled email that would be delivered to me on June 3rd 2025 (which should have been around the last day of school at the time) but my school district made some changes and now school ends in May (May 23rd for Seniors) so I just decided to dig it out of my scheduled mail folder. I’ve included the email below, I’ll make some commentary at the end of the post and I will likely make another post reflecting on my high school experience/senior year later.

The Email:

Hello, This is you from 4 years ago. If you can still remember, my ELA teacher just made me make a time capsule and I figured that the best way to do it was to type up an email and schedule the send date to be June 2025 when you graduate from high school. Perhaps you forgot about typing this email as you might be busier now and don’t have time to think about these things. I doubt you forgot about 2020 but just to refresh your memory, I’m just going to summarize it for you.

In January, the year started out pretty well, everyone was hyped for the new decade and things were going well. However, in February I heard about a virus spreading in Wuhan called “COVID-19” (also known as “the coronavirus” or “corona” for short) but I didn’t think too much about it. I just assumed that it was nothing and that things would continue going well. However, in March everything was flipped upside down. The number of cases in the United States skyrocketed due to the poor response by the government and many people in the US didn’t take the virus very seriously and that lead to many lockdowns (that people didn’t respond well to) and mask mandates (which people also didn’t respond well too). In April, you had to adapt to being able to learn virtually and it was a bit hard to get used to in the beginning, but it became much easier and in fact, it was much easier to learn from home than from school as you could wake up a bit later and you didn’t have as much work as you would’ve had if you were learning in person. Sadly, I wasn’t able to interact with other people. This continued into May and then June. June was when school ended and summer vacation soon began. I was fairly lazy during summer vacation and I didn’t have anything to do other than use the computer and occasionally go outside which lead to a relatively unproductive summer (hopefully as school ends this won’t repeat and I will actually be able to do something productive over the summer). Eventually, before I knew it, the school year began again.

In September, I had chosen to go to school in person again so that I can meet people again and actually have some social interaction. However, I hardly interacted with many people and I quickly found human interaction to be relatively annoying again. I soon hated school as I viewed school as an obstacle that prevented me from doing things that I actually wanted to do but unfortunately I was forced to do it as I didn’t want to get bad grades as bad grades would lead to bad things in the future and it would worry my parents as well and I didn’t want that to happen (hopefully at this point you didn’t flunk out of school yet and you actually have been accepted into university). However, I was able to find time and continue working on math, computer programming, and other things that I found interesting at the time. I found most of the activities that I was forced to do at school to be pointless and useless and the way some of the teachers talked to us about these activities made me a bit more angry than I should’ve been. I soon didn’t enjoy going to in-person school as I was forced to wear an uncomfortable mask, be forced to spend time on boring and pointless tasks, and I didn’t like interacting with people. Besides, all my friends were either in a different cohort or were in virtual learning which led to me being relatively lonely, and since I wasn’t willing to interact with others, I was just stuck in a miserable place. I was also taking an online math class and at times the teachers really frustrated me (one of my teachers kept forcing me to write two-column proofs and when I wasn’t able to do well on writing a two-column proof for the semester exam, she gave me a D on the proof section which tanked my grade from an A- (I was struggling at that point due to multiple factors) to a B+ which made my dad a bit upset). However, soon the number of COVID cases at my school shot up and they were forced to shut down and go to virtual learning. Virtual learning was slightly easier but unfortunately, I had to attend Google Meets with my teachers which were annoying and long but I could stay at home and avoid human contact and interaction. When I was given the choice at the semester to stay virtual or go back to school once the number of cases in the area went down, I chose to remain virtual and that made my life much easier. After a few months, I was able to complete my math classes and I was able to get an A+ for my Geometry course and an A for my Algebra course which made me happy and I basically had a free morning to do whatever I wanted which made my life much easier. Unfortunately, I still had other classes and my teachers still made me do tasks that I didn’t like (especially my science and history teacher) but that was just my opinion and I still did the tasks they asked me and I was able to maintain good grades. This continued until now, which is the end of the school year and I still have good grades and soon summer vacation will start within only a few days and I will be free to do whatever I want (hopefully over summer I will be able to have fun and be productive).

Hopefully, life in high school is fun and not incredibly stressful. I do know that you will have more work but hopefully, you have been able to keep up with it and maintain a good GPA (Hopefully around 4.0).

Hopefully, you were able to accomplish these goals:

  1. USA(J)MO qualifier
  2. USACO Gold
  3. Became more experienced in C++
  4. An AIME score of 9 or higher
  5. Become more experienced with OpenGL

If not, I’m sorry and I wish you better luck in the future.

--

( 6 / 3 / 2021 )

PS: check out this cool video

Comments

Reading over the email, I was kind of a whiny kid in Middle School. I think I have gotten better in high school as I did try to be less anti-social and friendly with my peers. But I would say that some of my anti-social tendencies seemed to have stuck with me still. Like I said earlier, I’ll reflect on this in a future post.

Most of this letter was me whining/ranting about how much I hated 2020 - 2021 with the main cause being COVID, which I suppose really showed how much COVID changed my life (in mostly negative ways but there were some silver linings to that awful time). I’m not sure if COVID caused/amplified my anti-social behavior but having little to no social interaction with my peers for almost a year probably did not do good things to me. I also still recall the frustration I felt towards my teachers which in retrospect was kind of unfair and me being a whiny child. At least COVID gave me enough free time to learn about various things that I though interesting. I distinctly recall learning how to make basic games in JavaScript at the time which likely was my pipeline into basically all of my other projects - I then started to learn Java and then C++ and I even wanted to learn OpenGL but at the time it proved too complicated/difficult for me (but that didn’t stop me!).

As for my goals, I was way less successful than I hoped. I never qualified for the USAJMO or USAMO (I did manage to take the AIME in all 4 years of high school). I only made it to USACO Silver and then gave up after that. I would say that I did get more experienced in C++ considering the number of games I made with it (albeit I still probably have much more to learn - and I also am trying out other programming languages such as Rust). The highest AIME score I got was 8/15 in Junior year which was one short of my goal for a 9. I unfortunately did slight less good during Senior year because I made a stupid mistake on one of the problems and got a 7/15. I definitely feel I became more experienced in OpenGL (but like with C++, I still have more to learn).

So overall, I would say that I have a 40% success rate for my goals - which isn’t great but that’s just how it is.

And yes, I did get rickrolled by myself from 4 years ago.

Wow, I was a cringy 8th grader.

Anyway, that’s it, have a nice day!