Four AP scores of 5, USACO Silver, and self-taught Python, all in Grade 8. Student E, a British national, studies at Stanford Online High School.
Profile
- Stanford Online High School, moving from Grade 8 into Grade 9
- AP: Calculus BC, Computer Science A, Physics 1 and Statistics, all at 5
- USACO Silver
- Mathematics competitions including PMC, JMC, IMC, Cayley, SMC (full marks) and MoG (Distinction)
Studying online
She had been at a girls' school in the United Kingdom, and after returning to China found the curricula difficult to join up. An online school solved it. Stanford OHS runs seminar-style classes in real time, offers over eighty courses including more than twenty at college level, and places students by ability rather than year group, which is how a Grade 8 student ends up in single variable calculus.
Her courses this year were single variable calculus, object-oriented programming and design, principles of physics, statistics and data analysis, and a literature course. The courses are not built around AP syllabuses and generally go past them.
What is actually hard about it
Not the coursework, she says, but working alone. In one physics practical she burned out a component in a circuit and could not work out why. There was no classmate and no teacher on hand, so she found videos online and diagnosed it herself. Office hours exist, but from China the time difference rarely lines up, so she books slots separately.
She is candid about the social cost. Contact with classmates is minimal, perhaps once or twice a year, and friendships are hard to build. Her social life runs through orchestra and robotics instead.
How she manages time
Her method is deliberately unremarkable. She writes a to-do list, notes what has to come first, and does not schedule by the hour. The one rule she keeps is to start as early as she can, because anything left to the last moment expands to fill the time.
"Everyone gets lazy," she says. Her fix is simply to do the assignment first whenever a gap appears, before anything else.
Following the interest
She met programming at eight, starting with Scratch before deciding that writing ordinary code was easier. What actually caught her was working out how robots function.
The direction is now specific: using computer science on environmental problems, particularly clean energy and materials. She distinguishes clearly between USACO, which is problem-solving under constraint, and AI competitions, which test how well you have understood a body of knowledge, and puts her effort into the latter because it matches what she wants to build.
The plan
Already mapped: move OHS to half-time, sit GCSEs, join an A-Level school, then apply to UK universities for computer science. The competitions she enters are chosen to match that route.
At Hanlin she takes the USACO Silver course and one-to-one UKOAI coaching. Her comment on the difference is a fair description of what structured competition teaching is for: she had been working through problems for a long time without ever learning which algorithms existed or when to reach for them.