Everyone thinks I’m good at physics. That I’m like really top 40 in the US in physics.
I’m not. I’m really not.
Their reason for these claims is my USAPhO gold result, which is true, I did score in the top 40, somehow. But the problem with anchoring everything off of this result is that, this is like a $>2\sigma$ result. Probably $>3\sigma$, actually, or more. On my mock tests prior to the actual USAPhO I was averaging less than one problem. Plus, the subject distribution was, well, certainly a unique subject distribution.
When I’m doing physics competitions with my friends who are physics mains, I feel like I’m usually getting carried. Like during OPhO, I definitely was carried (I think I solved <1/5 of the problems our team solved). Or during Pbrawl, I wasn’t carried per se (it’s a speed based comp), but I definitely had to leave the harder problems for others to solve. And I felt like I was definitely around the skill level of my USAPhO silver friends, and nowhere near the level of the campers.
My friends (ranked lower than me on USAPhO) have all, like, read like half of knzhou and grinded through a ton of textbooks and everything. Sometimes we are working on a problem and I get “trivial by knzhou”‘d (or morin or smth). But I really haven’t done as much prep as they have, and it shows. I also can’t solve anything related to relativity, waves, modern, etc.
I guess, until I actually get good at physics, I’m just going to have to deal with all of this… Like here, I’m actually nontrivially an imposter (ok I can’t say I’m bad at physics but I’m definitely worse than people think I am, and that’s kinda a pain sometimes)
