Doing Well in Chemistry Olympiads - IChO Silver Medallist

hey everyone and welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is ray and i just finished my second year studying physics and maths at cambridge and this is my friend benji and he finished his second year doing physics and chemistry so in this video we're going to be talking about the international chemistry olympiad because my friend benji here he uh got into the uk team for the international chemistry olympiad which we will abbreviate as i cho throughout the video so when we say i cho that's just referring to international chemistry olympiad um and then he getting onto the uk team after like doing round one round two whatever he ended up achieving a silver medal over there um so he's briefly going to speak about some of his experiences and preparing for the exams and basically everything to do with you so i guess i'll hand it over to you

by first asking uh i don't know what is it what are chemistry olympiads and uh why should people bother doing them okay so i cho is the international chemistry olympiad so it's a chemistry competition for people studying chemistry who haven't gone to university yet so in the uk that means people who are doing a levels uh usually so um that's year 12 year 13s but sometimes people from year 11 or even younger can take part the only limit is that you've got to be under 20 and you've kind of started studying chemistry at university so the actual competition what it involves is a theoretical exam and a practical exam so the theoretical exam tests the students knowledge of various advanced chemistry topics so it brings in some concepts from university chemistry but there's also a large focus on problem solving so the idea of the olympiad is that you use the knowledge that you do have to solve harder problems involving chemistry so everything's put into a chemistry context and the idea is that even if you haven't studied a topic in that much detail then you should be able to maybe work through the problem using the knowledge that you do have and so that's the theoretical exam the practical exam is similar so it involves some problem solving as well but the practical exam tests your competency in the lab so you were given three experiments to do you've got five hours to do them and you are marked on how good the results you obtain are so if you obtain a value that's close to the true value then you get a high mark and if you obtain a value that's not near to the true value then you get a low mark so that is the basic format of the competition both of the exams are five hours it's organized by uh the host country which changes every year and uh it sort of takes the form of a 10-day residential uh in the host country so when i did it then it was in paris the host country was france and we spent 10 days in france during which time we went on some sightseeing trips around paris we did both exams we did some other fun activities so that's the format and uh that's how it works and uh a big focus of the olympiad is to sort of uh allow young talented chemists to meet each other and sort of like form connections with people from other countries so i think uh it's something like 80 countries that take part every year so there's people from all sorts of different backgrounds at the olympiad and it's a really good opportunity to meet other people who are who have sort of a similar mindset to you uh

yeah that sounds good um so what kind of timeline are you expecting uh when you're when the olympian happens and like when you start trying to compete with the uk team okay so uh there's only four people who were chosen each year to represent each country at the international chemistry olympiad so obviously there needs to be some way of selecting those four and this is where the uk chemistry olympiad comes in so every year in january the uk chemistry olympiad round one happens and the round one paper in the uk is a two hour exam that uh asks six in the region of six questions uh relating to areas of chemistry that often come up in the olympiad so there might be a question on sort of like uh physical chemistry uh analytical chemistry doing calculations and stuff um inorganic chemistry talking about reactions involving inorganic species uh organic chemistry is a big one so there's always a question on organic chemistry asking you to draw the structures of various intermediates in an organic synthesis pathway so that's the format of the round one paper in the uk uh there's various awards you can get a gold you can get silver bronze and uh obviously fewer people are given gold than i give a bronze to get any award you've got to do quite well in the paper so the paper is meant to be very difficult so if you get an award then you've done pretty well and the next step after round one is round two and people are selected for round two by what happens is they take roughly the top 30 performing students in round one and they attend round two so round two happens in march roughly march i think mine was at the end of march and at round two this format is a residential camp for three or four days where uh the top 30 students from round one uh go to wherever the camp's being hosted when i did it was hosted in cambridge but uh i know for various reasons that might not be the case anymore so the top 30 students go to the round two camp and at you are taught a little bit about some more advanced topics that you might not have come across before and then using the knowledge from these little teaching sessions then you sit two more exams you sit a four hour theoretical paper which is similar to the one you sat in round one only harder and you sit a four hour practical exam which is very similar to the one that you sit at the international chemistry olympiad and how round two works is the top four students from the theoretical and practical papers combined are chosen to represent the uk at the international chemistry olympiad later that year and i cho always happens in july it might be early july it could be late july but it's always in july so you'll be you'll sit round one in january round two in march and then i cho is in

july yes i basically think that sums it all up uh so why should people bother preparing for like or trying to do well in round one of the uk chemistry olympiad uh like does it make university chemistry easier or does it make um i don't know university interviews easier if they're applying for chemistry or natural sciences or something um yeah why did you bother preparing okay so there's a few things to discuss here so number one i'd say is that it's fun so a level chemistry can become quite monotonous so and like repetitive and there's not a lot of opportunity in a level chemistry to sort of uh show off your skills or show off your problem-solving ability because a lot of the content you're expected just to learn and regurgitate in the exam and that's okay but it's not that exciting and it doesn't allow you the opportunity to really develop your skills all that much so the olympiad is quite different because a lot of the content that's asked about you'll never have seen before and you no one will have expected you to have seen it before but the idea is that you use what you do know to try and solve the problems that are presented to you and that's a lot more satisfying than what you do at a level because uh it allows you to really sort of like develop your understanding and also to uh use problem-solving skills to sort of like work through a problem that you've never seen before so in that respect doing the olympiads a lot more entertaining than doing a level papers so number two uh it's really useful for university admissions so if you're applying to oxford or cambridge for chemistry or any sort of science then doing the olympiad is really beneficial because it allows you to again develop those problem-solving skills and when you go for your interview at cambridge or oxford or anywhere else that does interviews like i know i had an interview imperial then it you'll find it really helpful to have looked at some of the olympiad stuff because at your interview they will ask you an unseen question they'll ask you something that's a lot harder than you see at a level they ask you something you've never seen before and they'll be expecting you to try and work through that problem despite never having seen it before so in that respect then the olympiad's really helpful with that and thirdly i think it helps with the a level so if you are wanting to get a good grade in a level chemistry then once you've done the olympiad then you will probably find it easier because the olympiad stretches you much more than a level does it requires more of you it requires you to think harder about things develop your understanding of things that aren't properly explained available so in that respect then it makes doing the a-level a lot easier and finally i'd say that it does help you adjust to university so at university then you are by no means expected to get everything in an exam right so at university if you get most of the stuff in an exam right then you've probably done phenomenally well compared to a level where sometimes you need very high marks on an exam to get a good grade because at a level then you're expected to know everything in the olympiad and at university you're not so the olympiad papers are really good preparation in that sense because if you get everything right on the olympiad then you will have done the best in the country nobody gets everything right maybe one person gets everything right but it's it's if you get uh half of the stuff right in the olympiad paper then you've probably done really really well and you've probably maybe even done well enough to qualify for the second round so that gives you a sense of how different two exams are and so yeah i think it's just really good preparation for all of that stuff and it really pushes you if you're finding the a level sort of like a little bit straightforward then the olympiad really helps you to develop your skills and learn more and understand more most importantly um

yeah so most of the students who say a levels they will likely do round one in year 13 um well in the uk um and i heard it is offered to like year 12 students but you won't do as well as like year 13 student just because of the commission knowledge um so they also have the cambridge chemistry challenge which i heard you said as well um which i think happens towards the end of year 12. uh and did you do any preparation for that um because that's sort of like the olympiad or in what ways is it like the olympiad the difference and how did you prepare for that okay yeah so the cambridge chemistry challenge is quite similar to the olympiad the only difference is that in the cambridge chemistry challenge there's possibly even more of an emphasis on problem solving so i'm just going to abbreviate it as c3l6 because that's what it's called i think the website is c3l6. com i'm sure you'll put a link in the description if that's wrong um so in c3l6 then they give you lots of information in the problems because uh their sort of like mantra is that you should be able to solve most of the problems even if you've never seen any of the material before so they'll give you plenty of info and then they'll give you some really difficult problems to solve so the problems aren't easy just because they've given you lots of info the info just makes them accessible even if you don't know anything about that specific area of chemistry so uh the problems are sort of like a similar style to the olympiad they're sort of hard chemistry questions hard but accessible and so c3l6 is really good preparation for the olympiad and uh it's sort of like the precursor to it if you like because it happens in june of year 12 and then the olympiad happens in january of year 13.

so my personal experience of c3l6 was that i only just got interested in all this olympiad chemistry stuff just before c3l6 in year 12. so before that i'd never really heard of the olympiad or c3l6 or anything so i only had a couple of weeks to prepare for the c3l6 so i wasn't as well prepared as some other people were and uh i only got a gold so i want i say only because there's a higher award in the c306 called the rowing genium award and that goes to roughly the top 60 students and if you get that then you're invited to a residential camp at cambridge where you'll do some chemistry activities and i taught some more advanced topics and stuff like that so i didn't get the rent union i only got a gold i was happy with the gold at the time because again i hadn't done much prep but um many of the people who go on to do well in the chemistry olympiad do get that rowing union award so in terms of having something to aim for in year 12 then c3 l6 is really good because uh if you manage to do really well in it then you do get invited on that camp and that will be a really valuable experience if you managed to do that my personal experience of course i didn't get that rowing union award i got a goal so i didn't go on the camp uh but i realized i was really interested in sort of like the olympiad style of exam and i was really interested in doing well in the olympiads so after c306 i spent a lot of time in the summer preparing for the olympiad and um obviously i managed to get through a lot of content i managed to do a lot of reading all the olympia pass papers and so i managed to do even better in the olympiads so i made it to round two and then icho so uh c3 l6 is really good it's a really good precursor to the olympiad but it doesn't define how well you do in the olympiad so there's loads of time in between c306 and the olympiad for you to work on your chemistry and work on your exam skills chemistry problem solving skills so that's all about c3l6 uh yeah so that

leads on nicely to how did you actually spend that summer preparing because you realized after c3 l6 are you interested in everything um to do with chemistry link heads what did you actually do during that summer to prepare yeah so during the summer then i uh spent a long time preparing so the main things i did were do the olympiad pass papers so this is possibly the most important thing because obviously when you're preparing for an exam then the best thing to do is to do the past papers for that exam so by the time the olympiad rolled around i'd done all of them and if you do them all then you'll start to see your scores sort of improving time after time so that was quite nice to watch the progression happen and number two and probably if you want to do well in the olympiad this is a close second like you'll need to be doing this as well you need to do some reading so there's two textbooks that are really useful for the uk olympiad in particular one is called chemical structure and reactivity by keeler and waters and that is sort of like an introduction to general chemistry it sort of talks about structure and bonding there's chapters on kinetics thermodynamics there's chapters on a little bit of organic there's chapters on an introduction to quantum mechanics in a chemistry context there are chapters on a little bit inorganic so not all of it's 100 relevant but if you manage to work through a lot of the material from csr which is just chemical structure and reactivity then you'll be you'll have a really good uh sort of like a foothold to do well in the olympiad because you'll have been introduced to a lot of the content that they tend to ask questions about so you need to read the textbook and um possibly just as important is attempting the end of chapter questions in the textbook so most textbooks do this they have sort of at the end of a chapter they have a load of questions that you can work through to solidify what you've read in the chapter so if you just read the chapter then you might learn something but you probably won't understand it that well unless you attempt these questions so doing the end of chapter questions is really crucial for actually solidifying your understanding of what you've just read so the method is read the textbook do the end of chapter questions use what you've read to do olympiad past papers so that's the first textbook csr and then the second textbook that's really important is organic chemistry by clayden warren and greaves i'll just call it claydom for simplicity but claydon is a really fantastically useful book it's sort of like it works through organic chemistry in a very logical fashion and it starts from not a lot so you can read clayton even if you don't have that much background knowledge so i'd say clayton's accessible to someone who's doing well in a level and if you work through claydon and again do the end of chapter questions and try and check your answers then you will really quite quickly develop your organic skills and it will help to no end with doing the organic synthesis questions in the olympiad papers because requires a little bit of knowledge of various organic reactions it mechanism because although you aren't asked to draw any mechanisms it's still really important to understand how transformations occur because if you don't understand the mechanisms behind stuff then you won't be able to approach unseen problems in as effective as a manner so claydon is a really good book it walks through everything in a very mechanistic fashion so it i'd say if you're doing the olympiad then clayton is probably the most important book to read so that's what i did in the summer i read claydon i read csr i didn't read all of clayton clayton's a very big book i probably maybe got through the first half or maybe slightly more than that but if you get through the first half and you do the end of chapter problems and you sort of solidify your understanding of the material in there then you will be in a really good position to do well in the olympiad because uh you will you'll know far more than a lot of other people who do in the paper so that's what i did to prepare in summer and uh it worked out quite well so that was my strategy um so a few points on that um did you do all the csr as well or was that just the first half as well or something okay so csr is not as big a book as clayton so csr is more uh it's more realistic to get through all of it but there are some chapters that are largely irrelevant so there's a chapter on something to do with inorganic that you don't really need to know anything about and um if you do the past papers you'll realize what you need to know so if you do some olympia past papers you'll realize what it would be beneficial to read about in csr so no i didn't read all of it but i got quite a way through it yeah so as for doing past papers i'm guessing you did past papers alongside reading the textbook or did you just try and read as much of the textbook and then start doing past papers or like did you kind of sandwich in between how did you approach that yeah so i did i approached it sort of like side by side so i did pass papers and read the textbook more or less simultaneously and what i mean by that is i didn't do a past paper while reading the textbook i mean like i did a past paper and then read a bit of the textbook and then textbook so if you do one or the other first then you'll probably burn out more quickly because it's it's not very exciting to just read the textbook and on the flip side if you just do the past papers you probably won't develop your understanding as well as if you did them in conjunction with reading the textbooks because there might be some concepts in the past papers that you don't realize uh or you don't fully explore like you might meet a concept while doing a past paper but then you might need to read the textbook to fully explore everything behind the concept and learn more about it so you can apply it in future i see

so as for workload um how many past papers or how often were you going through past papers like every few days or um and how many chapters of a textbook are you reading well basically how many hours are you spending and preparing over the every day or so that's quite a hard question because i can't 100 remember so take this with a pinch of salt but i was spending quite a lot of time on it over the summer so um there are past papers available back to something like 2005 for the first round of the uk chemistry olympiad and between june and january i'd done all of them so i think over six months and that's completely realistic like how many papers does that mean there's something like 16 papers and you can easily do them over a period of several months and then reading the textbook um both textbooks are quite chunky and the material in there there's a lot to work through so yeah you do need to be quite dedicated if you want to get through it all because there's a lot to get through but honestly i can't put a number on in terms of workload because i just can't remember and even if i like i don't i'm not ones or like track my workloaders as closely as that so i even when i'm doing it i don't really know how long i'm spending on it

you essentially did quite a bit of extra reading um with csr and the clayton's book uh when you got when you made it past round one and you met other people on the residential did you find that many people did the same thing or like what is distinct distinguishing those who are doing well in round one and getting gold maybe and then the top thirty are actually making it to camp is it that they all read clayton and like the book and or do they just have better problem solving skills or yeah what is it okay so this is quite an interesting one and what i'm about to say is almost entirely anecdotal so you must take this with a very large pinch of salt i think there's broadly three type of people three types of people who make it to round two type number one is people who've done a lot of extra reading so they've worked through the textbooks and they they've read a lot of extra chemistry above and beyond what's on the a-level syllabus type number two is people who are really good at problem solving so they've just got a knack for problem solving they might have done a few past papers they can work through an unseen problem and give it a good shot and number three is people are really good at maths so depending on how mathsy the round one paper is then there's always someone at round two who is good at chemistry but they are better at maths and uh because a lot of the questions in round one are just sort of like solving difficult problems that are quite mathsy then it's quite common for someone who's really good at maths to make it to round two even if they might not necessarily be that focused on chemistry so that's broadly the three types of people who make it to round two however i'd say that from round two the people who qualify for the team all fit into category one so the people who qualify for the team have all done a lot of extra reading because if you haven't done a lot of extra reading then round two will probably be a little bit of a step too far so the olympiad it is possible to do well without having done all this reading and stuff but it's probably not possible to do really well that's my perspective on it like some people's opinions might vary on that but that's my perspective on it so i'd say it is possible to make it to round two if you haven't done all that much extra reading or possibly even no extra reading but i'd say it's probably not possible to make it past round two unless you've spent a lot of time learning extra stuff

yeah so how about for round two uh when you got to round two did you do more preparation like a few days before or well when you got invited to round two were you preparing more or and how were you preparing in that sense or was the preparation you did over the last summer good enough for round two okay so round two is slightly more difficult to prepare for them round one because there's no past papers available so the past papers are private they're not made public you can't access them so that makes the exam a bit of a surprise because you don't really know what to expect however there are some decent ways you can prepare so often some of the questions they ask at round two are quite similar to questions they ask in first year of the cambridge chemistry course so what you can do is you can try a few past papers from the first year cambridge chemistry course so they are freely available online someone submitted a freedom of information request and they were given them up to 2018 and i'm sure you'll put a link in the description and so what you can do is you can look at the past papers from the first year cambridge chemistry course and you can try a few of those questions and especially the spectroscopy questions are quite similar to the questions that they ask him round two and um i'd say the majority of the paper is relevant the organic question is a little bit different in style from what they give you at the olympiad so the organic question in the first year cambridge chemistry paper is quite mechanistic whereas in the olympiad then you generally aren't expected to do anything mechanistically but i'd say all of the paper is fairly valuable preparation uh the only question that's not really relevant is the inorganic question i'd say that's not really relevant for the olympiad so you might as well not bother doing that but i'd say the rest of the paper is decent preparation and it's better than nothing because uh obviously with no round two past papers then it's difficult to prepare by doing past papers so i'd say doing the first year cambridge chemistry papers is a pretty good compromise and what else you can do is just keep reading the textbook so when they invite you to round two then they'll usually send you out a copy of chemical structure and reactivity csr and they'll probably tell you which chapters are particularly relevant so they might say read chapter 11 or read chapter 13. so if they do that then you can be pretty sure that they're going to ask a question related to the material in that chapter in the round two paper so make sure that you've got those chapters really solidly worked through and make sure that you understand everything pretty well and then finally the last tip is to look at the international chemistry olympiad prep problems for that year so the prep problems for the for i cho are problems that sort of uh reflect the content that will appear in that year's eye chair exam and they are published in january every year and they're put on the icho website which i'm sure you can find by google in it changes every year because it's a different country hosting and the prep problems uh list six topics of advanced difficulty i think they're called fields of advanced difficulty they're usually listed at the start of the prep problems and these fields of advanced difficulty are advanced topics that candidates at the olympiad will be expected to have a detailed knowledge of so for example it might be nmr spectroscopy so if that's a if that's one of the fields of advanced difficulty then you're expected to be really good at nmr spectroscopy because there'll be a problem on it in the exam and obviously these are published in january so by the time round two rolls around in march then the organizers of the uk chemistry olympiad know what the field of advanced difficulty are and they'll know what uh topics the students that are selected for the olympiad will be expected to have knowledge on so in round two it's not uncommon for one or more of the questions to relate quite closely to these fields of advanced difficulty and that's quite nice because you can find out what these topics are before you do round two and so i think it'd be quite valuable to look at them and do some reading specifically focused on those topics and um yeah i think that's those are all my

tips yeah so i suppose that ties nicely on to um what you thought is the difference between those um who are at round two and those who are actually making onto a team is it just that they prepared more for these difficult like fields of advanced difficulty and because we said earlier that some of the people have a real knack for problem solving that only takes them so far because there's only so much you can figure out before you actually have to like sit down and learn the material um what would you say is setting those two people are pods those who are making it onto a team and those who are just doing round two yeah so there's often quite a few people at round two who are just really good at problem solving but maybe they haven't done that much extra reading i'd say that the people who make it onto the team are both really good at problem solving and have done the extra reading to back that up so um when i did it then i i'm pretty sure all of all four of us on the team had read a lot of extra chemistry but we all had good problem solving skills as well so you need to develop both aspects if you want to make it onto the team and qualify for i cho i'd say probably they're both as important as each other you really need to be quite dedicated if you want to uh make it because there's very stiff competition and plenty of other people at round two will also doing a lot of extra reading and problem solving people

just be developing from doing past papers and stuff like that right yeah so to develop your specific olympiad problems holding schools you need to do the end of chapter questions in the textbooks and you need to do the past papers are possibly the most valuable thing you can do but um it is possible to develop those skills like it's not just like people have a natural talent and they don't need to do any work like it's possible to develop both aspects of the skills you need so when

you were problems when you were developing these skills or while doing these past papers were you doing the past paper like completely in the three hours or were you like saying well today i'm gonna do these two problems and you just disregarded the time or how did you approach that and i'm guessing you stepped back from the problems as well and thoughts about it for a while uh did you have a strategy there okay so my strategy was i did every past paper timed sticking quite strictly to the two hour time limit and after the two hours was up i'd finish the paper if i hadn't already finished it but sort of like mark where i ran out of time and then after i'd finished everything and i was happy with it then um i would mark the paper and i'd note down what mark i would have got if i'd actually sat that exam and then what you can do is they publish the grade boundaries every year and they publish sort of like a graph of how everyone did and you can look at your score and you can figure out where you lie on the graph so you can see whether you'd have been invited to round two whether you would have got a goal a silver or bronze and i think that's helpful because it allows you to assess how you're doing in real time and it allows you to sort of like monitor how much progress you're making and how and it also allows you to figure out how much extra you need to do to achieve what you want so say you want a goal and you're at a bronze then if you're doing a past paper and you're getting like bronzes then you know that you've got to put a little bit more work in if you want to get up to that goal whereas if you are getting a gold and you want to qualify for round two then uh doing these past papers and marking them according to how they would be marked if you actually sat it allows you to sort of um figure out how much extra you need to be doing and in terms of when you when it came to setting the papers did you have any exam strategies such as saying um if i can't figure out this problem in the next five minutes i'm just going to move on or did you have any sort of rules in place which you think made the exam easier and because you don't have any choice in the olympia do you no there's no choice so you've got to attempt every question and yeah i'd say i didn't have any strict rules but i'd say it is important to be able to move on quite quickly so the problems are designed to be really difficult you're not meant to be able to do every little bit so if you're stuck on a problem and it's taking your ages then it is important to be able to just ditch it at a certain point and move on to the next one because another key bit of information is that in every problem there are accessible marks so there are marks that are quite easy to pick up and it's really important that you manage to get all of these because uh if you can get all of the easy marks first then that will set you up really well for doing well on the paper because the difficult bits are can get really difficult and it's important not to labor over them too much if you haven't picked up the easy marks elsewhere first

yeah no that i think that sums up nicely all the questions i had we did have a few viewers sending questions um so the first question we have here is um how much time did you spend studying for the chemistry olympiad compared to your actual a levels would you say like it was solved at even splits between the two or um did you prepare more for the chemistry olympiad so i did probably the bulk of my preparation in the summer between year 12 and year 13. so that made it a little bit easier because i didn't do any a level work during that summer so i could sort of devote all of my time to doing the olympiad prep so that made it a lot easier because by the time a level started up again in september then i was already fairly comfortable with the material that i'd studied for the olympiad and it was easier just to work on it on the side of my a-levels um another important point is that if you study well for the olympiad it will probably make a level chemistry quite easy for you so you probably won't have that much difficulty with all chemistry if you've done a lot of olympiad prep so in terms of workload that takes another thing off your plate and then um once i'd qualified for the for i cho then i it's hard to put an exact figure on it but i'd say i probably treated i cho just as importantly as my a-levels so i did a lot of prep after i'd qualified so yeah it was intense i'm not gonna die that wasn't i'm not gonna deny that it was intense but um i think it was doable i think there's there's a way to find a balance and um if in doubt i'd say prioritize your a-levels because they're your actual qualifications they're what's gonna uh stay with you for your future and stuff and they're what's that they're the primary thing that universities will look at but if you can find a way to do some olympia prep on the side then i'd say it's really valuable to

do that and i'm guessing you just sort of made the time because when a level started again in september and you had to prepare for university applications and stuff you were still doing prep on the side was that just a few hours a week and you were just fitting in wherever your schedule was available or how did you make the time for the problem when a level started again so i made time for the prep by because obviously when you're doing a level then you should have free periods so they're quite a good opportunity to do some and um i saw i think my strat this was quite a while it was like almost three years ago now so just bear with me so um i think a strategy was get all your a-level homework out the way first and then with the time you've got left do some stuff for the olympiad because that means that you're not stressing about like not being able to hand in stuff and because you don't need to hand in anything for the olympiad like it's just something you can work on for yourself so i think it's probably best to do it after you've done all your a-level work but i i don't remember finding it difficult to do olympiad prep on the side it depends how dedicated you are to it like if it's something that you're really interested in doing well in then i think you'll find a way and if it's something that you just want to do for a bit of fun then you don't need to take it all that seriously if you don't want like it's just it's just at the end of the day it's just like a and a super curricular competition and if you don't do that well in it doesn't really matter because all that means is that you don't get to do these cool extra things like go to the camp and go to the itu but um if anything is it it's you shouldn't be put off doing it because you think it's going to take up too much time like if even if you don't do any prep for it then i'd say it's still worth doing because it's still a good experience

yeah no i think you put it really well there um there was another question how did you uh what did you find to be the best resources for preparing your conceptual understanding of chemistry was it just those csr and clayton's or did you find like videos online or um how did you like what did you find to be the best for improving your conceptual understanding so i didn't watch any videos online but there are a couple of other textbooks that you might find useful so one of them is called elements of physical chemistry by peter atkins you could look at physical chemistry by atkins but in all honesty is probably unnecessarily complicated and elements of physical chemistry are sort of like an introduction to the concepts in a in an easier to process way you've got to be careful when using that though because most of it's irrelevant for the olympiad like you don't need to know most of it in the ad so anytime you spend studying that in detail will probably be wasted so i'd use that in the sense of if you see something that you don't know what's going on in an olympia paper then you could look it up in the textbook so it's good for any like physical chemistry concepts that you might not have come across before and another textbook that you might find useful is inorganic chemistry by greenwood um i sorry i think it's called chemistry of the elements by greenwood so uh again that's a similar sort of thing most of it's irrelevant but there might be some bits in there that you find useful for looking stuff up uh personally i didn't really use either of those two you can get quite a long way just by googling stuff like if you google if something comes up in a past paper and you're not sure what's going on then you could just like google it and you'll probably find some good resources there's loads of stuff available on the internet but you've just got to be careful when you're doing that because you don't want to get something that's a not advanced enough or be too advanced so you just gotta use your common sense when looking for resources like that and seeing what you can find that

seems useful yes sounds good um there was another question on uh you said you started preparing in the summer um how does this compare to when other people on the camp were preparing as well do they stop preparing earlier or did you find they did the bulk of their preparation of the summer okay so i can't really speak for people on the camp because i didn't really speak to them i didn't ask them about that sort of stuff in that much detail but i can speak for the people that made it to i cho with me so out over the four of us i had started preparing by far the latest so just to put that into perspective two of the people i did it with had made it to round two the year before whereas i hadn't even sat round one of the olympiad and uh another one had been involved in olympiad stuff quite a while and i hadn't really heard of it before then so in terms of preparation i'd started the latest so um i guess that shows that it doesn't matter if you're starting that late it's still possible to do well if you if you're dedicated to it and you really want it and um but obviously that like with anything the earlier the better like if you if you're in year 11 or year 12 and you're thinking yeah this is something that i'd want to get involved in then the earlier you can start preparing the better chance you'll have and it doing really well so it doesn't matter how old you are if you're interested in doing the olympiad and uh doing well in the olympiad then you can start preparing anytime it doesn't matter how far through you are with your a-level course the textbooks csr and claydon

are accessible even if you haven't done the a level so just if you want to get started then get started it doesn't matter how far along with your a level you are or even if you not started the a level you can pick up the textbooks and get going yeah no that's good um so for the final question i guess uh what made you interested in chemistry and made you devote all this extra time to it was it just because that you did this c3 l6 you're like hey this like chemistry problem solving is a bit of fun and you got to kick out solving problems and that just made you want to carry on or was there i don't know something before then okay so i'd say there's three main reasons number one uh i found the exams fun so the problems i got asked in the exams i enjoyed solving them it was very satisfying to get the right answer and it was satisfying to learn more about chemistry that i hadn't seen before um so the exams were fun in of themselves number two uh i was really interested in doing really well so i thought it was quite cool that like the top achievers in these competitions were like given special awards and um i thought i'm quite a competitive person so it was really interesting for me to figure out how well i could do in these things and number three um i thought the prospect of uh going on these camps and even going to icho was a really big part of why i wanted to do it so obviously if you do well then you get to go on these camps to cambridge or wherever else they're held and you get to have a have these fancy meals with the organizers and everything paid for of course everything paid for so all of these camps are fully paid for so uh that was quite a big draw because it's pretty cool to get something like that just for doing well in a chemistry exam and if you can make it all the way to icho it is an absolutely amazing experience so we went to paris we spent 10 days fully paid for in paris did loads of sightseeing explored the city met loads of people from all these different countries so the experience itself even if you completely discounted all the chemistry stuff then the experience itself was still really worth doing and uh obviously the country that hosts it changes every year so you never know where you could end up just off the top of my head i don't know where the next few are going to be held but if you look it up then you should be able to find out because they're published quite a few years in advance and so yeah i mean if you do well in these exams and you get really cool things out

of it yeah no that's fantastic yeah um i think that's pretty much it for all the questions thank you so much for doing this um for any viewers who have any questions or maybe even want to be tutored or something by benji um then you can contact his email which will be in the description down below and i don't know negotiate any rates there or something like that or i don't know just ask any inquiries i mean he is like pretty busy so um yeah in case he doesn't reply or like it takes quite a while or a few weeks then don't worry about it uh but hopefully this video was incomprehensive enough for you to like start preparing on your own and you don't need to need much further guidance from that uh that's basically it for us um if you've enjoyed the video and stuff like that yeah share around do thumbs up everything like that um but i guess yeah that's it yeah we'll see you next time bye see ya