It's too bad my younger brother, Jakun, isn't here today, because by all rights he should be the one to speak. At one of his recent math competitions, someone who apparently recognized my name asked Jakun what it was like to have a famous brother. "I don't know, but I imagine it must be tough," he replied, "just ask my brother, Lenny."
In all seriousness, people often ask me what it is like, as a friend put it recently, "to be so smart," to have appeared on the cover of Parade magazine and been featured in Newsweek, Life magazine, and even Sports Illustrated for Kids. I can tell you that it's been a lot of fun, and extremely rewarding. Through my activities and competitions, I have made lifelong friends, seen fascinating places, and met people even more famous than my brother. Perhaps my greatest blessing is a mind enchanted by everything from math to music, from literature to tennis. I have been fortunate to have a wealth of opportunities as eclectic as they have been numerous. And much of my success should belong to my hardworking, devoted, and visionary parents.
Even as early as preschool and elementary school, my parents fostered and encouraged my many diverse interests. When I was three, my father wrote up a multiplication table for me; I remember this because I drew all over the sheet. I was exposed to literature early, reading Dickens's Oliver Twist at the age of six before seeing the high school production of "Oliver!" My early artistic masterpiece, a crude painting of a pelican, still hangs in my father's office, and his colleagues often remark that they have never seen anything like it before. For good reason, too: still weak in biology, I had given the pelican four legs.
Most precious to my parents, I suspect, was my interest in music. My father taught me fractions not for the math but help me understand half notes and quarter rests. I started taking piano and violin lessons when I was four, and a year later composed my first piece. I quickly learned to use my parents' enthusiastic support for my composition skills to my advantage; if I broke a plate or upset my parents, I would run to the piano and tell them that a sudden musical thought had come to me. The house would hush to preserve my concentration, and after I had finished composing, all would be forgiven and forgotten.
School was not quite as encouraging as home. Some at school were not especially sympathetic to my academic needs. My age denied me participation in many programs. . . . Luckily for me, some teachers turned out to be very helpful. On recommendation of my second-grade teacher, I skipped third grade. In fifth and sixth grades I was put in a special "self-contained" class designed to stimulate the academically gifted. Throughout this period, I pursued an independent study of mathematics under my father's guidance, completing Algebra II by my sixth grade year. My sixth grade teacher suggested that I take the Scholastic Aptitude Test in order to participate in the Duke University Talent Identification Program (TIP), a summer program mainly for gifted junior high students. So when I was barely 10 years old, I took the SAT, and was surprised to learn a couple of months later that I had aced the math portion.
This was probably my "big break." A few reporters from local newspapers found me, especially after I won the state Algebra II contest shortly after . . . I was able to take course at the high school when I entered junior high, and by eighth grade I had taken Advanced Placement calculus and chemistry.
Outside of school, I continued to pursue various interests. I swam, ran track, and played basketball and tennis. My music compositions and playing began to win prizes. For three summers beginning when I was eight, I attended the Duke Young Writers Camp. . . . In the summer of my seventh grade year, I was fortunate enough to attend TIP on a full scholarship, studying number theory.
The next year I tried to apply to a state summer science program for rising high school seniors but was rejected, again because of my age. To my surprise, I was accepted to a much more prestigious national program for rising seniors, the Research Science Institute . . . I found my experience there during the summer of my eighth grade year to be enormously stimulating.
These summer programs were only one aspect of the opportunities I enjoyed. When my mother discovered my knack for spelling, she interested me in the spelling bee, where in my eighth grade year I won a trip to the nationals. My greatest success was in math competitions starting with MathCounts . . . I was president of my high school's Math Club from eighth grade onwards, and our out-of-town trips to various competitions are among my most enjoyable junior high and high school memories.
I never took competitions too seriously, even in high school. To me they were breaks from schoolwork, chances to travel -- and incentive to work hard, because winning was fun! By the end of my high school years, springtime meant the beginning of a rash of contests, something I miss sometimes now that I am in college.
I especially miss the annual American High School Math Exam, which became somewhat my contest as I broke the previous record of two perfect papers by writing four consecutive perfect papers. That contest is the first step in a sequence culminating in the summer Math Olympiad Program, or MOP, to train for the International Math Olympiad. Ever since eighth grade, when I first attended MOP, it has become an integral part of my summers, enough so that I am returning this year as a staff member. As a student, I was on the six-person American team at the international competition for three years, winning a silver medal in Sweden and gold medals in Moscow and Istanbul. The experience was simply thrilling and well repaid all my preparation.
Of course, competition, no matter how fun, were subordinate to schoolwork. Here I chose an accelerated path, skipping various math, science, English, and history courses, and jumping ahead to their Advanced Placement versions. In ninth grade, I began taking courses at the nearby University of North Carolina with the extensive help of my long-suffering mother, who drove me endlessly from the high school to UNC and back again. At UNC, I took physics, history, and computer science classes, and enough math courses to fulfill the math requirement for a Bachelor's degree. . . .
I came to Harvard because of the opportunities here and the diversity and talent of my fellow students. I take part in the intramural sports, and play violin in the Mozart Society Orchestra and the pit orchestra of the Gilbert & Sullivan Players. When I need a break from the unrelenting pace of academics, the nearest museum, park, concert, or ballet is at the most just across the river. The classes here are wonderfully challenging -- I am taking a graduate level math course, for instance -- and there is even a spot of academic contests here: I was a Putnam Fellow in last year's Putnam math competition.
That is the story of my academic career so far, a story that has only just begun. I owe my present success to the multitude of opportunities I have been given, and I would like to think that anyone given similar chances can and will do similarly well. Unfortunately, schools nowadays show a troubling tendency to emphasize "feeling good" rather than excelling and to encourage their students to slip into comfortable mediocrity. My brother, Jakun, who is currently suffering through a secondary schooling when the so-called "middle school philosophy" is all the rage, has encountered obstacles far worse than those I encountered. His middle school reasons that all students should be treated equally and denies Jakun and other talented students their chance to excel. It is a pity, because if Jakun receives the same opportunities I enjoyed, I am sure that one day my friends will be asking me what it is like to have a famous brother.
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