How to Prepare for Getting into a Top Uni During Secondary School & Sixth Form

hey everyone welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name's ray and i'm just about to start my third year doing physics here at cambridge and in this video i sort of want to talk about problem solving and why you should be improving your problem solving skills and sort of talk about my own journey and how i went to about it and how i think you should be going about it as well so this video is going to be pretty long and rambly but feel free to skip to any of the timestamps below so anyways i

want to talk about what i mean by problem solving and improving your problem solving skills so problem solving in my eyes is thinking about a solution to an unfamiliar problem using knowledge that you already have um and this is a case for a lot of math problems and a lot of science problems in the sense that you have learned the content and now you just see an unfamiliar problem and you're sort of bridging the gap between getting that piece of content and applying it to this particular problem and the harder it is to do that for this particular problem the harder the problem becomes because in many cases for extremely difficult problems while whilst you may have all the knowledge it's just a case of how do you actually apply this knowledge to this problem um so some particularly easy problems where it's just recalling a definition um that doesn't require much problem solving it's just like memorization and for much of gcse nail of course is a large component of it is relates to memorization and there is only a little problem solving in the sense that you may get taught how to do a calculation or some method and then it's just a case of repeating that method but with slightly different numbers or something which isn't really problem solving but that's usually the idea i have when i think of problem solving and then critical thinking is more to do with like the humanities where you're critically analyzing a piece of text or something and problem solving for me is more to do with um science and math space subjects so that's what the idea i have in my head when i'm doing when i'm problem solving um and you should get a better idea of what it means to you when you're tackling really difficult problems as well um as i will go into that later in

the video so there are a few reasons for why i think it's worth getting really good at problem solving and why you should start actively trying to improve your problem solving skills sooner the first of it which is to do with universities so improving your problem solving skills really does add to your university applications and increases your chances of getting into a better university as well um this is particularly true if you're applying for say oxford or cambridge for like maths of science related subjects um because when you write about it on say your personal statement then it it's clear that um like you've accidentally tried to improve your problem solving skills when you write about competitions and stuff or when you said that admissions test or even that interviews they're going to be presenting unfamiliar problems to you and then you're going to have to be working for it and if you have constantly been working through difficult problems before then you're going to find the problems that they give in say interview or admission sets much easier as a result and you will be able to much better um work off any prompts they give so in interviews they usually end up giving you prompts because you're not meant to know how to get started with the problem immediately um or they may give you hints and suggestions when you get stuck and see how well you respond to those sentences suggestions and if you've been actively improving your problem solving skills before and like potentially working with friends as well then you're much better able to take on those hints and suggestions to like get to a solution so adding on to your university application is really beneficial especially if you've done well in some competition or something or you've achieved like a silver or gold medal or like a certain rank of squirrel um that really does help in your personal statement and like universities really love that stuff and you don't even have to do exceptionally well um like many of my friends they are still here at cambridge and they got like a bronzer a silver you don't have to like have gotten a goal don't always get top 10 or um in the country or something like that like just showing that you've actually tried to improve these skills is really beneficial itself and some of my other friends they just didn't take part in any competition so the competitions weren't really available to them and it was completely fine for them as well so don't worry too much about it but i am saying that if you have the opportunity to take part in these competitions or like asking your teachers whether they can enter you in for these competitions which i will mention later in the video um is well that's a fantastic opportunity to write about on your personal statement or when applying to universities also in terms of university itself it makes university much easier results because in university you're going to be especially for science and maths based courses you're going to be tackling many unfamiliar problems during the exams and like problem sheets um which are meant to help you improve those skills um and the better you have been before at like just tackling unfamiliar problems the easier like just doing the supervision work or class work um or work for lectures or just um the exams will be because you've actively been improving those skills before and that frees up so much more time to be able to do um say other things like hanging out with friends and whatnot or just like what the hell you're interested in um so it basically means that you need to spend much less time to achieve like say the same grade or the same mark as someone else who hasn't really been improving their problem-solving skills much before university and i found that to definitely be the case in the sense that some of my friends who were just really good at problem-solving before university they like have to revise less hours than me to like achieve the same grade or like even better upgrade so the second reason for why i think it's worth improving these skills is because it's just fun so like you i mean it sounds pretty silly to say this um because like if i say maths or something if you don't feel like you're being pushed in your math lessons or you just feel and you just find yourself bored during the lessons or just like not ever seeing an interesting problem or something it can be really difficult to imagine like having fun just solving problems um and when you start doing these problems or like just if you're so used to getting much of the content in say your math lessons right or like homework then when you see one of these new problems it may seem like very uncomfortable at first because you have no idea how to solve it and it can just be easy to pretend like oh these problems just don't exist or like just avoiding these problems which is like not what you want to be doing um because when you like when you just get started with a few of these problems and like problems which are just outside your comfort zone so you feel like you're just able to do them when something clicks in your head where you finally manage to solve the problem after like many like an hour or two of trying or like potentially even longer or many days about thinking about a problem off and on um like you feel a huge sense of satisfaction and it feels so much more fun or you come across with surprisingly surprising results so like what your intuition tells you about um a particular problem is like completely different from what the math ends up telling you which is like something really fun and worth thinking about as well and also because it's super satisfying when something clicks in your head or like you've been truly a problem for so long and then you just like get up and i don't know go take a walk or like go eat dinner and then you come back to the problem and then like something just clicked in your head and then you're suddenly able to now do the problem and you or like you had no idea how to start and then during a walk or something or just doing any of activity you end up getting an idea in your head and then you just feel an urge to like rush back to the problem and just see if like this new idea that you came up with works and for me personally i found that process to be really fun and like just really valuable um and the more times it happened the better i could tell i was getting a problem solving itself and the final reason for why you should bother is because you can get some really healthy competition and it can seem difficult to like especially if you're say one of the best students in your master science classes or something it can be especially difficult to get that level of competition um because maybe other people in the classroom just don't care too much or they don't care as much as you or they're just not as interested in the subject or like for various reasons but there are people like in hundreds of schools across the country who are just so much better you're than you have those skills um and then you have nationwide competitions so like the british mathematical and piano and british physics olympiad um where like students across many different schools who are all really good at problem solving like have friendly competition with each other and compete for like say getting into the following rounds or getting medals or even in many cases if you get to the following round then you may be potentially invited to uh some camps like the ukmt runs um or some like training programs um where they like training to be even better problem solvers or some other programs where they select who get to represent the uk or what whichever country you're from in their international physics maths biology chemistry or whatever olympiads teams but there are literally hundreds of students from all around the world like teams in between four to six from every country and they just all come together in one place or one country for that year and then like they have a bunch of excursions around the city and town they get to meet so many other like-minded individuals um who are also really good at that particular subject and they basically get to have a great time talking about this subject and they also get some exams to see how they rank compared to these other students worldwide which is like crazy to think about um and i've had friends who've like got to this stage where they made it on to like the uk's team for like the physics olympiad of the maths and one period of the chemistry olympiad and they just said they really enjoyed like the whole journey of the whole process of like just getting better and getting these new medals or like seeing their skills improving and like one year they didn't qualify for the team the following year they did qualify or like one year when they sat the competition they just didn't do well whatsoever but they didn't let that get to them and they like prepared over the course of the year and next year they just did it even better so whilst i didn't make it that far i think the furthest i've made was getting about top 200 um in the british physics olympiad um so whilst i didn't make it to any like training camps or selection programs it was still a lot of fun in my school um to just like um yeah meet a bunch of or well have friendly competition with friends who also really want to improve their problem solving skills or even in one case i was invited to um a follow-up round from the british physics only had so i think everyone who got a gold medal was invited to the british astrophysics and astronomy olympiad which was a whole lot of fun as well and i ended up getting a silver medal there but i didn't qualify any further from that or that i was also invited to a camp in oxford which unfortunately i was not able to attend uh for the summer after year 12 were a bunch of guitar students who did well in like physics challenges um like they were just invited to go there um but i wasn't able to attend due to some summer schools and stuff um but like this is a whole culture and there are so many people who are interested in like want to go to these camps and like meet other people and do well enough in these competitions to be invited to these camps that like i wish if i knew that sooner and this just culture existed out there then i would like have worked so much harder to improve my problem solving skills and potentially me make some fantastic friends or like have just had great memories at these camps or even enjoying the process of trying to represent the uk on the same british physics olympiad team or something although i would say that during this process is worth bearing in mind that some problems will be easier for some than others and it all depends on your experience so if you meet a lot of other people who are on a similar level or even if not better level of problem solving than you and they just see a problem and they're able to solve it much faster than you it's more of a case of that they've seen something similar before or they've done something similar before which like sort of reduces this mental um like barrier almost or mental wall uh for them to be able to solve that problem um so don't feel too bad it's more of a case of experience like they may just have an experience with a more diverse set of problems than you and it just means that instead of like feeling jealous or feeling like just feeling any negative emotion it's worth just asking them if they will solve a problem much faster than you like how were you able to do this like what about the problem led you to like think about this particular solution or way and just learning from them is so much more beneficial because it helps you improve and then like it helps them improve a little bit and they get to like enjoy explaining a subject they really like so i would say that as a brief caveat for anyone who is who ends up making on these camps or meeting other people um who are like at these camps or gets invited to them so i'll briefly speak

about my own journey or experiences in problem solving and i think my first expo exposure to like just difficult problems which i wasn't able to solve so readily uh were in the uk challenges um so we had the junior challenge in year seven at which i sent and then i didn't sit any other challenges until like year 10 which was an intermediate challenge and i didn't even realize what they were so i just sort of showed up to lesson one day and then the teacher was like oh hey we're doing this thing like if you want to do it then like yeah go ahead um and i didn't realize what it was or i didn't realize the value in it or i just thought it was like some random thing that no one ever did and they were just sort of wasting our time with and there weren't any follow-up rounds prizes that you could receive um and i really wish i knew that was a case sooner and that like if i did well enough on this and that can be invited to follow brands and then potentially be invited onto like uh these camps for people who are really into maths and are really quite good in maths as well i just disregarded and i just completely ignored like that one day where we were just given a bunch of fun problems to your sheets or well it didn't seem fun at the time because they were so unlike any other problems i had seen before and they felt more frustrating because i just couldn't get them or they didn't click so quickly as some of the mask content that we had been actually covering as part of a gcse or lessons so basically in year 10 and year 11 i learned pretty much nothing new during my maths lessons and we had like five hours of maths lessons a week and i just sat there doing nothing for most of the time um because my math teacher wasn't just like oh you're good enough like you're just gonna get grade nine anyway so why does it matter um and he said that from the beginning of year ten and wasting five hours of maths lessons a week um for two whole years is like is pretty bad and i could have spent those lessons like actually trying to improve my problem solving skills but i just didn't and i didn't realize i had to do this or well that this is like a thing that people used to do if they're just bored in math lessons or like boarding their science lessons they just tried to get better at problem solving i didn't realize that was a thing until pete and that people did until i got to um sex form um and then one time when i went back to my school for um my secondary school and i asked my math teacher about this he said that um he never really told students to do this or the department the math department in my school never told students to improve their skills or they just never like gave more challenging questions to students because they they were too focused on the pass rate on the school which is complete like kind of understandable um and yeah they just said they didn't have the time even though i think that's like a kind of excuse because you just sort of you just don't have to tell them like one lesson for about 10 minutes like hey it looks like you're pretty bored this is a thing that exists why don't you get involved um and that's when i realized that in life most of the systems aren't meant to push portuguese or like they're designed for the average person so the system in my math department and my school was designed for the average student who just wanted to like get past gcse mass and they just completely disregard or just ignore the students who was like gonna get phenomenal grade anyway um whereas in other schools around the country um many teachers aren't like this or because they're not concerned with the pass rate too much because say it's a grammar school or a selective school the teachers have more time to devote to like this more fun problem solving related maths um so then people at normal schools just end up falling behind those people um because they don't have anyone to push them further anyways i didn't realize how much i would enjoy problem solving until i think it came to my gcse exams at the end of day 11 and i remember there being one question on like one of the papers where there were three circles inside a rectangle and it gave the radii of the circles and then it asked you to calculate the area of the rectangle and i remember just staring at the problem very confused um for like two or three minutes and then literally something just clicked to my head and i realized i could sort of draw a triangle and draw a few things and then like calculate the length of the triangle and then us and rectangle and then calculate the area of the rectangle overall and i came out in the exam feeling so pleased at finally having to got this thing which i thought i would never get and then even more pleased at the fact that i don't think anyone else in my school got that question right and when i like showed this like a genius relationship like people were people really enjoyed that fact and i enjoyed sharing the solution and even though like they didn't get it right um they enjoyed like listening about the solution and the same goes for when other people end up getting something right that i didn't get right when they show me the solution i get like a certain kick out of it so i really love that moment um so that then going into year 12 i sort of knew that i should be improving my problem solving skills so i did like a little like doing two or three challenging problems a week um although i don't think the problems were too challenging where i didn't push myself hard enough with those problems i was sort of doing lighter problems um so i knew i sort of should have been doing this thing and but i didn't know to what extent or what extent people were doing this until about the end of year 12 when i went to a summer school at eaton college which was for state school peoples and i met a student who was at the summer school and he like got the seventh high school in the country for the british phys and master olympia that year but he didn't make it on to represent the uk at the international mass olympiad and instead he was at the summer schools i asked him like um i remember asking him why his hair and then he just said like because i didn't make it to the imo team uh and i may be in social mass olympiad and if he made it onto imo team then he would be like in another country instead and this was sort of his like second choice phone which was like very surprising to me but i didn't realize how much people push themselves and how much they to what extent they just did tons of challenging problems to really improve their skills until like i saw him in the library just doing like some crazy difficult problems from like the ivo shortlist um and he would do like many challenging problems a day especially like during the summer and during holidays when he would get so much more time um and then i realized at that moment that i should be pushing myself so much further so then after that uh about for august and september and october um after year 12 and into year 13 when i was applying for universities in october um i made a really active effort to continue to improve my problem solving skills to extend like a huge sort of doing it and doing like many challenging physics and math related problems a day which helped me do really well on my admissions test and also like helped me to do well enough on the interview and get an offer and then it also helps me to do well enough on the british physics olympiad that i got um within like the top 200 um scores for that year um and that was just two or three months of work um like taking problem solving a little more seriously i was also on a bunch of summer schools that summer so i didn't have time to do it all day but i made an effort to do like two to three hours a day and that was hugely beneficial in the long run um and across three months i sometimes wondered to myself if i had done like an hour a day like for the last year or so i would have been so much better or if i even did like an hour or two a day for like two or three years or if i started in say like the start of year nine that i realized i should improve my skills um like how much better would i have been now had i realized this so much sooner and this is a question that just sort of comes to mind like would i have made it onto the like imo team if i had started sooner or later because the thing is a lot of people who do make it onto a team um they do start earlier than other people um or like if they start later then they put in more hours than other people as well because i imagine it being like a race or a marathon and everyone has different starting times um and if you start later then if you want to catch up to other people then you're gonna have to run much faster um if you're getting the same rates as in then like they're just going to reach a finish line before you because they started sooner so i sort of imagine this in my head so the whole point of me telling you this is that i would encourage you to start your start developing your problem solving skills as soon as possible if you want to apply for anything stem related at university like maths physics chemistry engineering any science subject computer science like if you want to apply for something any like anything mathematically related then it's really worth improving your problem solving skills no matter what stage you are at now um whether that's like you just started year 12 or 11 or like even sooner just doing say 30 minutes to an hour a day right now of like pushing yourself with an extra problem which you find really difficult um can be hugely beneficial and if you're really enjoying the process and you can step up to like two or three hours a day or like um just i don't know meet friends and discuss um discuss the problems on these online communities or these discord servers or the student room or the auto problem solving which is has some really great forms where people discuss this these challenging problems and just sort of joining or immersing yourself in the community surrounding it can be like so much fun and not feeling any jealousy within the community and because if you join like a few problem solving related discord servers which you end up finding online or through the art of problem solving and you make a bunch of friends who are really into improving their skills as much as you are then like you can i don't know play games together online and you can discuss a lot of problems and like if you find one which is particularly satisfying or interesting then you can like show it to them and they can show you something similar and like if you're struggling with the one they showed you then you can ask them for a small hint and like just this sort of community or feedback um oh it's just super enjoyable for me and i find that to be super enjoyable even though my limited experience with it and i wish i had like got stuck insist so much sooner as well um because it would have been really beneficial for me and i would say that no matter how young you are you should just start and robin waiting around being like um oh i'll start when i'm in year 12 or something or you start at the end of year 12 so it's completely fine if i start until then like no it's just beneficial to start this sooner and you just enjoy the process so much more or you get to like appreciate and appreciate the journey and meet so many more interesting people along the way um just so much more and don't be afraid to sort of like take on competitions which may seem outside your league initially or like outside your i don't know comfort zone um like many competitions uh the british physics olympiad or the uh british chemistry olympiad round one usually are sent by year 13 students i remember studying in year 12 um i didn't get anything in the british chemistry olympiad um like my school was just terrible and then the following year i had sat out and i ended up getting like a silver medal instead um being like a mark or two of a gold medal which was like really fantastic because it just sort of showed how much i had grown to come along and like the earlier you are like if you're in year nine of your ten year ten um then you have so many opportunities to take these competitions year on year because they have usually happened about once every year which means that you really get a fantastic feeling of knowing how much you've improved year on year and you get to like talk about the competition or compete with some friends online and just basically do a lot of great stuff so don't be afraid of say if you're in year 9 or year 10 and you went to the senior maths challenge which is usually for set by year 12 and year 13 students like many year 10 and year nine people like just do better than most year 12 and year 13 students so like it's completely fine to enter ask your teachers to enter you into competitions which may be outside your league for that year um and they may not be because you may just surprise yourself how good you actually are and so even if you just started year 11 or year 12 there's so much progress that you can make in just improving these skills and um like even if you're not applying for stay anything stem related or you're applying for medicine then just like being able to approach unfamiliar problems is just a skill which is incr like really transferable to so many parts of life um when it comes to like actual problems for um applying for universities or these competitions or like the ucat or the bmat or any admissions tests it's just a super transferable skill there and just when it comes to solving problems in your own life um because in many of the problems that you face in your own life like usually you do have the knowledge and information and you know what you should be you kind of do have this in your head bury deep inside somewhere and then it's just a case of like getting that out or speaking to the right people and sort of like solving problems together in your life so whilst i don't actually improve my problem solving skills much these days at university i found that skills horrible i just don't get as much of a joy in solving like unfamiliar physics problems as i used to um i get so much more of a joy in like solving problems in my own life and helping friends solve their problems and sort of discussing it with them and just solving a different level of problems basically um and i found that to be super valuable now and i feel like having developed my problem solving skills and physics somehow has helped me to be more analytical in my approach to solving some of the problems in my own life would be more rational in that regard um so yeah it's super transferable so as

for how you should actually go about doing this um i would recommend first familiarizing yourself with many of the competitions that you can be entering so over here i have the ukmt website so you can see a bunch of stuff on their website you can go on the challenges then you can see all the challenges they have available so let's say that you are in year 10 and you won't see the intermediate mathematical challenge you can see the date it's going to be and you can see the time a few things thresholds for getting awards in previous years morks wise and you can see what follow brands they have there so preparing for the challenge like you can use uh the online database they have so like these are the intermediate challenge papers so like i can go here and see the 2021 paper and just see a bunch of these like really interesting problems especially towards the end when they get much harder um and then also to see the solutions from the problems and like then comparing my own answers to the solutions here and then there's an investigation so that it gives you a chance to also investigate further um which is also really good um and then there are a few other websites linked it says this competition is usually for people who are in year 11 or below for england white whales and overseas um and like the senior mathematical challenge which i sat during the sixth one um yeah so that's like year 13 or below so like if you're in year 10 you can be sitting this and it gives the dates as well and the entry deadline so if you want your teachers to end enter you in for this then like you have to let them know by this deadline or just send them a link to the page and be like hey can you answer me for this and then on the day you can just sort of show up to the school um on the 10th to 11th of november and just sit in the paper and then that gets sent off gets marked and then you can see like how well you've done um so i remember setting the senior mathematical challenge in year 12 and year 13 um which was a whole lot of fun so um i can probably remember some of the problems from like the paper i ended up sitting like say in 2020 um which yeah does ring some bells here um especially like the final few problems here because i remember really getting stuck on these but like then looking at the solutions um they just make so much more sense and this is just a fantastic opportunity to familiarize yourself with the problems and then get started um or we'll see some past papers that you can be attempting and if you enjoy the process or you're getting kick-outs or like you find yourself really pushing your abilities then that's like a fantastic sign and you should like keep trying to get high of that feeling and now like say for a different example that i can search the british physics olympiad which is a b-p-h-o so on the website you can go here you can see the format you can see what competitions they have available for students in different years like you don't necessarily have to be in year 13 to send this competition like you can be in other year groups and when you click on these you can just like say intermediate physics challenge just see some of the past paper solutions um which should be here somewhere or well they definitely offer the senior physics challenge oh yeah here past papers and then you can see a bunch of these past papers um and uh here it is so and then you can just try the past papers and then you can see like how good you're getting and you can you'll find your skill slowly improving which with each paper which is like a fantastic sign also on that note if you're trying to improve your maps related skills i think the maths ones are the easiest to improve because you don't require to you're not required to know too much content like for say the british physics olympiad um for round one like you're required to know quite a bit of year 13 related physics content um but like for all the uk nt challenges um for the senior challenge anyway you're only required to know up until the end of uh year 11 and like gcse um but it doesn't mean you should learn ahead you'll just find out what you need to know as you're doing more problems and if you find yourself unable to be unable to do one problems then it just means like you have to go away and learn that material rather than saying oh let me learn the whole of gcse maps before starting this like no you can just start now um so i would recommend getting started with whatever is in your age range currently and then seeing how far you can take and if you're finding it too easy then you should like take it further so let's say i'm in year 10 there is the intermediate mathematical challenge i can go and do some past papers for that and then let's say i'm finding the past paper is a little too easy so i can go back to challenges and then i can see like okay um in a normal year if i did the intermediate mathematical challenge then the scoring is such that if i scored above 118 and i then i can qualify for the mclaren olympiad let me see what the mclaren olympiad is all about um and then i can go here find some more past papers for like the mclaren olympiad um and then like just see this and then just get started with these problems as well there's like literally so many problems you can be doing on this website and now some of the older problems like if you find yourself enjoying the new problems and you're just exhausted a little bit then like do buy the books and just have a go at some of the older problems because they're like really cheap um and there's so much value for money like the amount of like the amounts you're going to be gaining from these books is fantastic and they're worth every penny like spending i don't know five pounds in a video game probably won't provide you nearly enough enjoyment or will say like you're going to end up completing the game um or it won't really help you too much in the long run or helping your like future life as much um as like some of these problems as well or like it's way too easy to just spend like five pounds and a bunch of candy and sweets and stuff whereas like spending five pounds or three pounds in the case of this book it's just so much more beneficial but it's understandable if you generally don't have the money um because in that case like for some if i go to shop then you can see some of these books are a little expensive like 16 pounds uh for some of the like olympia priming books i would recommend going on the pages and actually seeing who these books are targeted at and getting a sense of like what books are worth getting don't buy too many books to begin with like two or three is usually fine enough and then just see the read age and some books especially like um like john travel triangle or like topics and commentaries um which are a little more of the advanced books they get kind of expensive but if you generally don't have the money to buy them um then i would recommend asking your school and or asking your maths department at your school and just being like hey i really want this book like can you just buy for me or just asking like the library at your school if they can buy for you because usually they're more than happy and if you convince them like saying oh it'd be like good for my grades or good for my university application when that comes around or it's like literally going to change my life in which in many of these cases it will change your life in the books it's like a pretty tempting argument for them to buy for you now a few other ways to get started is i would recommend looking at problem solving related youtube channels so like one of them is mind your decisions which is this channel so he has so many videos of just like interesting problems which he then presents a solution for and in many of the cases seeing the solutions for the problems that you've been struggling with like helps you realize that where you went wrong and just helps you to improve your skills as well um so like the only problem here is that you don't exactly know which age group these problems are talked about so you may find some to be really difficult but like pick problems which you feel like you're just about able to do or just outside your comfort zone or well in this case there is also black pen red pen which also does a lot of interesting problem related stuff maybe at a slightly higher level but i mean it's still fun to see or even looking at problems from other countries so like there is the amc which is american mathematical challenge uh so if i search amc math uh then a bunch of stuff comes up with the competitions and you can on some formatting competition you can understand their age ranges and then just do papers from there um or you can go to what i have a list of problem solving bookmarks so let's say you're at a level and you want to improve some of your problem solving skills then if you go to this link in the description you can see i have a few lists of resources which i would recommend so like in books i relate to maths and physics uh websites challenges youtube channels computer science i also put some resources there um or like go to the gcse section and see that if you're a gcse student then you can see the a-level section just yeah it's a really good resources and i may be adding more to this in the future so do bookmark this and come back to it and see the last time we've updated it or if you have any suggestions and just leave them in the comments down below for like problem solving resources which i can add on to this list or that you just recommend for other people also as another small point i will be making a few more videos with some of my friends who've done international olympians and made it onto a team for the uk and a few other countries um so i'm aiming to cover every olympiad at least so far i've only covered the chemistry olympiad which you can find a video of with my friend here doing well in country olympiads ico silver medalist uh there will be a playlist in the description which i will be slowly adding to but i would highly recommend watching these like long form interviews with them just gonna send them their journey and what tips they have and how they prepared and everything like that because that can be immensely useful if you have no idea how to get started or just seeing other people who've been through that exact journey so i'd highly recommend watching videos about people who've done olympiads online um watching a few of the ones that i will be releasing of this month and next month and then just searching like international uh mass olympiad and seeing what comes up and potentially you can see like some interviews with like say the yes coach or just some highlights and whatnot which is all fun so well um and then the final thing is like once you've sort of familiarized yourself with this and what you can be doing like just get started doing the problems like the best way to improve your problem solving skills is to actually do new and challenging problems themselves and like there's no worry about it i mean it's useful to have a few tips in mind so the next video uh which if it's out should be linked above somewhere right now it will be about tips that i picked up like i'm just improving your problem solving skills uh but it's all it all still comes down to just doing more problems um the tips will all be centered around just doing more problems and how you should be approaching problems um but yeah like just do more problems and do them consistently enough over the long run and even doing like 30 minutes to an hour a day if uh like maybe more if you want to take it more seriously or you want to aim to get on like the uk team or something or the team for your respective country like just doing that is going to be immensely beneficial for like the future the long run just and you're really going to enjoy it and really enjoy the journey and meet some incredible people along the way and it's just going to be fantastic so i wish i started problem solving or improve my problem solving skills much sooner and i hope you can too oh like you can learn from my knowledge and apply it to your own life and improve your problem solving skills but yeah that's basically for now um if

you have any questions about this then i will be happy to answer them in the comments down below uh at some point but i guess i'll see you later bye