My experiences

Introduction into Olympiads

I first got into olympiads in class 7, when I found out about the Junior Mathematics Olympiad conducted locally in Mumbai. The thing that really pulled me in was that for most of the questions I attempted, I had no idea how to approach them. In fact, I sat down with my dad and we spent an entire day trying to work with the questions. This was something completely new to me because I'd never seen math questions that required these sorts of concepts or a similar level of "thinking". I also attended a crash course conducted for the exam, and learnt a lot of cool topics such as Permutations and Combinations, Modular Arithmetic, and some Trigonometry.

I ended up with a gold medal at the exam, and that's where I found out about the olympiads leading up to the IMO.

2019-20 Olympiads 

This was class 8 for me. I prepared for PRMO (now known as IOQM) from a couple of books with past questions like this one, and narrowly managed to pass the cutoff. 

At this point, I had basically never solved an RMO question myself, so my hopes for getting through were quite low. But I found out about these "RMO Classes" run locally, and taught by Komal ma'am (who now teaches at Narayana, Mumbai). Once again, the reason I was super passionate about the math I did here is that most of the time, I was clueless. I didn't initially know where to start or where to go, so the feeling when you could overcome this was really what pulled me into math.

I prepared a fair bit and reached a point where I could solve roughly half the previous year problems in RMO available on their official site. At the exam, I scored 17 marks. While the cutoff for INMO qualification was 17 as well, I missed out on the basis of a tiebreak :-(

2020-21 Olympiads

Lockdown had begun and we were all restricted to out homes. While I had left math olympiads for a fair few months after RMO the previous year, I now began preparing once again (and also I didn't have a lot of other things to do!). The rules had changed a bit, and there was no RMO this year - with direct qualification for INMO through the IOQM (which was similar to the PRMO in terms of difficulty, but only ~500 people from the country cleared it now).
By now I was quite comfortable with the computational problems in IOQM, and I managed to make it to IOQM with a fair bit of margin (I didn't want to let tie-breaks come into the picture again!)

So I was now giving the Indian National Mathematical Olympiad. I think the biggest advice a lot of people gave me is to enjoy the paper. You only get the opportunities to write such an exam a couple of times in your life, so it's important that you make the most of it, and enjoy it regardless of how you did. While my expectations were quite minimal, I kept my confidence high in the lead up to the exam, and decided to give it my best. 

At INMO, I scored 19 marks, and I made it among the top 75 of the country as a "Merit Awardee". (Merit Awardees were scrapped from the next year, so I was in the last batch of them, lol.)

Since the camp was online, they allowed merit awardees to attend it too (usually, only the top 30 are invited to the camp). This was a big learning opportunity for me, because it introduced me to a lot of topics I didn't have experience with. I also began preparing somewhat more "seriously" around this time, and I read the geometry chapters from EGMO by Evan Chen, as well as some chapters from Olympiad Combinatorics by Pranav Sriram (who was teaching at the camp!)

2021-22 Olympiads

I think this is the year I got introduced to how big the olympiad community was. Till now, I had basically only known the people in the RMO classes I had attended, but I slowly got introduced to a wide variety of online forums - such as OTIS and the Sophie Fellowship. I became a student in these programs, and while the math I got to learn was a big positive, an even bigger positive was the people I got introduced to. I think this was somewhat important to me, because till now there were very few "olympiad friends" that I had, with whom I could freely discuss and solve olympiad problems. And when you have people to solve problems and enjoy with, it makes things a lot more fun!

Anyway, this year was even worse in terms of the disruptions because of COVID19, and the entire selection process was condensed to a single step with a 1 hour IOQM and 2.5 hour INMO conducted on the same day. This time, I cleared INMO fairly satisfactorily (although I was still pretty scared I've messed up until results came out, oops!). I even got the opportunity to teach at an unofficial training camp conducted by people in the Sophie Fellowship (check out this page to see the classes!)

2022-23 Olympiads

Starting class 11, my dream to make the IMO had now officially become real. Till now, it had seemed like a somewhat "distant" dream, but I now knew a fair few people who had achieved that goal, and somewhere I felt like they weren't on a different planet from me. If they could do it, so could I - and so I put my heart and soul into my preparations. I also had the opportunity of taking one-on-one classes in OTIS from Atul (who is now an IMO Gold Medalist at MIT), so learning from him was a big opportunity. 

I also got lot of opportunities to teach: I took 5 lectures at a Vedantu camp for INMO, and several classes at the Online Math Club -  I was a close friend of the director, Pranav, so whenever he didn't get enough classes he'd ask me ;-)

Teaching is something I particularly enjoyed. Firstly, it helped me strengthen my concepts a lot. Until I had taken my first class on Graph Theory, my knowledge of it was pretty limited - but as I went through several handouts in the lead up to my classes, I found out about a lot of cool things, and I also had a stronger intuition on how and when to use it. And secondly, it was just a lot of fun to teach people who were super passionate about the olympiads!

I also got to know about a lot of camps and applied for them - I was selected for and attended the the MBL Balkans camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the STEMS camp in CMI. I also cleared INMO once again, and I finally had the opportunity of attending IMOTC, with lockdown having ended. These were huge learning experiences for me, and I also got to meet a lot of my friends in real life - and by the end of IMOTC we were all practically a family :)

The Team Selection Tests, though, were a pretty miserable experience. It had been my dream to make it to the top 6 and represent India at the IMO, but I couldn't make it - a pretty big heartbreak for me. I still ended up with a decent rank among the top 20 or so of the country (the exact ranks weren't announced), but I was really disappointed. In fact, it took me almost an entire month to get out of this, and realize that my success wasn't defined by whether or not I could make it to the IMO team. 

2023-24 Olympiads

This was the final year of my high-school. I took on various new initiatives - I became the director of the Sophie Fellowship, an instructor at OTIS, and I wrote a book on olympiad combinatorics! I was also admitted into the Oxford program in Mathematics and Computer Science.

I approached the olympiads quite differently - it was more of a fun activity, and I made sure that I wasn't putting too much pressure on myself to do well. And as it turned out - I did quite well :). There was definitely a fair bit of luck and chance involved, but I ended up qualifying for the Indian team by coming 6th in our national team selection tests, and won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad 2024.

But really, when I look back at my olympiad journey over the years, I don't think winning this gold was the ultimate high point. In fact, I don't think there was a single high-point at all. It was all about the journey - it is this journey that stays close to my heart and makes these olympiads extremely special to me, and I feel that this journey of preparing for the math olympiads had taught me more than anything else.