math team (and other horrible things you do to get into stanford) | Benexdict 

I read “math team” because Jasmine referenced it in one of my favorite essays of all time :

Of course, we ought to pick the right games to play, ensure that we struggle toward the right kinds of ends. There’s nothing that makes me sadder than watching a friend bust ass for a job or relationship that doesn’t enrich them. Effort must lead to reward. The feedback loops have to work out. There was this essay on competitive math  that spread around my Twitter circles lately. The author mourns the pointlessness of the activity, the divergence between the math problems that get you into college and the math problems that push the field forward. I think the problem was actually that he didn’t like the game enough. I have an old rule for myself: Never spend time on something I’d end up regretting if it didn’t lead to the outcome I hoped for.

Some quotes:

The worst part was knowing that it was all going to be extruded into a few lines in an application form, that a committee would review for about ninety seconds before moving onto the next perfectly interchangeable application from some other straight-A tryhard. They wouldn't care, like I didn't care. I hated them dully, like I hated the other applicants that I had to outpace, like I hated myself for being unable to put it all down and find some other way.

I ran into Harry at a party a few years ago. He studies as much math as he can, taking programming jobs when funds start to run low. I couldn't really follow the work that he tried to explain to me, something about counting the paths in a changing topology. What would that be like, I wondered, as his words floated gently through the space above my head, to just be interested in something, not as a stepping stone or as a resume line, but just to sit down and count the paths, just because you wanted to know how many there were?