I was honored to be selected as a finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, and it includes a weeklong trip in March where they do the final judging and select the top 10 scientists in the country. I’ve heard from others that the Finals Week is a life-changing and extremely fun experience, so I’m going to write a short blog post every day so I can capture these special memories.
I woke up at 6:30 am this morning so I would have enough time to get to the airport this morning. I’m still a bit drowsy, but it’s good that I woke up early because I’m going to be waking up at 5 am PST — or even earlier, in the coming week. After I boarded the plane, I met one of the finalists from the Bay Area, Charlotte Rosario! She’s really into behavioral science and neuroscience, and her project is really cool. She compared brain scans of transgender kids to cisgender kids before they underwent puberty and found that there were differences, particularly in the areas of the brain that regulate emotions like anxiety. Although we didn’t know each other, we had a lot of friends in common because she goes to the Nueva School and a few of my former classmates switched there for high school.
The flight was overall fairly mundane, except for the end when we finally got into DC. It must have been extremely windy outside, because the plane started bouncing up and down like a roller coaster! The pilot had to make a loop around the airport and land from a different direction. After we landed, Charlotte and I made our way to baggage claim and met a few of the other finalists from California: Elisa, Matteo, Minghao, and Yash. Even though there were only six of us that arrived at the airport, we got picked up in an enormous bus that could seat 60 people (I counted).
On the bus, I learned more about other people’s projects. Elisa did a computer science project that had to do with automatically repairing bugs in code. Minghao and Matteo did space science projects, and Yash did an environmental science project.
When we got to the hotel, which has absolutely stunning architecture, we got our room cards and unpacked. While us West Coast finalists have arrived at the hotel, the rest of the finalists haven’t arrived yet. That’s why this blog post is called “Day 0.” The competition starts tomorrow, but West Coasters get to come in one day early to adjust to the new time zone. After unpacking, I had some extra time so I started drafting this blog post, then eventually went down the elevator to meet the other finalists, Hrithik, Kevin, Logan, and Owen, before we headed out to dinner.
We went to a restaurant called Founding Farmers & Distillers. Probably because there were so many of us, there was a set menu, but we could choose our own main course. The restaurant had all types of cuisine, from Chinese to French. I ordered the beef, which came with broccoli and a side of cashew fried rice. I loved the conversations that I had with the other finalists during dinner. We somehow went from ranking which values were most important to us: money, fame, impact, and fun, to talking about AI safety which spiraled to a conversation about the easiest way to make a mass killing weapon (don’t worry, we want to prevent that from happening). At least among the people I talked to, most had some interest in starting their own company in the future.
After dinner, we headed back to the hotel, and finally got to check out the finalist lounge and other rooms that the event would be happening in! I played Jenga with a few of the other finalists. Everyone was going for surprisingly risky plays. When I play with my family, at least, everyone is risk averse and goes for the center blocks so the tower is still balanced perfectly. Among my group, however, people tried going for the bottom side blocks so that it would be as difficult as possible for the next person to remove a block. Kevin went to his room for a bit and came back with a huge airplane, which he brought to show off in his Project Video and during Public Day.
Unfortunately, since he cut it up into pieces to fit it in his suitcase, it can’t fly anymore. But it still looks cool! What’s special about his plane is that it’s an oblique-wing aircraft, which means that it only has one wing that pivots around an axis in the center. It’s more efficient than traditional aircraft, but it’s also harder to control. Kevin developed a flight computer so that it could be controlled like a regular airplane. We all asked Kevin a bunch of questions about his project, like whether commercial airlines would adopt the oblique-wing design soon. He thinks that it would be hard to get it into the mainstream because people are already afraid of flying, and planes with asymmetric wings would look even more scary. But I hope that one day people use oblique-wing planes, maybe even with Kevin’s computer!
We eventually all decided to go up to our rooms a bit after 10 pm. Technically, curfew is at 11 pm, but we are all tired from traveling and want to have some time to prepare for tomorrow. So that’s it for Day 0. Check back tomorrow for Day 1!
