AS: For the past year, I’ve been hanging around in Australia, where I'm from. I look forward to starting university at Cambridge, though there’s a lot of unknowns. I can’t point to a specific thing I’m excited for because I haven’t experienced uni yet, but the idea of starting is really exciting.
AS: I’m doing computer science at Cambridge, and I’m really interested in areas like AI and cybersecurity. I’ve been doing those this past year. During high school, I was more focused on the Informatics Olympiad, which is mostly algorithms. But in the past year, I’ve been doing online competitions like CTFs [Capture the Flag], and I’ve really enjoyed that.
AS: I started around Year 8 or Year 9, so about four years ago. What got me into informatics was solving problems with code. Like Google Maps—you convert roads into graphs and run an algorithm to find the shortest path. That’s what initially got me into it, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
AS: They’re different, but in a lot of ways, they’re similar. For all kinds of problems, you have to come up with some innovative approach. Whether it’s informatics, AI, or cybersecurity, you need to find an edge—some insight that other competitors don’t have. That’s what I like most, thinking creatively.
AS: It was mostly through personal research. I started getting into it around Year 7 or Year 9, but it wasn’t really through school—more just my own interest. I worked on things like coding generative models and finding my own data to train them. I enjoyed doing that kind of stuff.
My experience has been good, especially in informatics. I’ve been doing it for about three or four years and went to the IOI in 2022. It’s been a really positive experience. I’ve only been doing AI and cybersecurity for about a year, but informatics has definitely shaped how I approach problems—building intuition and thinking creatively, which I think will be useful at university.
AS: If you’re competing in something like the IOI, you’ve probably been doing informatics for a few years. It’s a big competition, so you need to be prepared. But stress too much about the competition itself. You should learn for your own sake, not just for the competition. Even if it’s stressful, the knowledge and experience will stay with you, so don’t worry too much about the results.
AS: I think the main thing is learning to build intuition when solving problems. A lot of what you learn in computer science becomes outdated pretty quickly, but the way you approach problems sticks with you. That’s the biggest takeaway for me—learning to think creatively and come up with new solutions.
AS: Yeah, I think creativity shows up in a lot of places. Like, I played tennis for a bit, and you kind of build your approach to a match based on your opponent. It’s vague, but you need creativity to figure out a strategy. It’s similar to how you approach problem-solving in computer science.
