59:55
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I started reading through the first question, which was already worth 19 out of the total 100 points.
Bonding Orbitals are HIGHER/LOWER in energy compared to antibonding orbitals.
What the hell is an antibonding orbital? I thought to myself. For a moment, I assumed someone might have mentioned it in AP Chemistry and that I’d only forgotten because it had been over a year, but I didn’t remember a single instance of the word antibonding ever being used before this.
Alright, I told myself. I’m not going to get anything out of this if I keep staring at the page. Just skip. There were more than enough questions to look around to try and get points first. I decided on just answering easy questions for now; there’s no point in spending four minutes staring at something that won’t give any points. Some had to be guaranteed for myself before eventually trying to figure out questions on theory that I didn’t even know.
I would later be very happy that I went with that strategy.
50 minutes left. Then 40. The timer was counting down quickly. I was dimly comforted when the test turned into something that I actually remembered how to do: assigning oxidation states. Slightly encouraged, I did that quickly and turned onto the next page, hoping desperately that I’d see something else that I was actually familiar with.
Unfortunately, the next few minutes were a nightmare.
I proceeded to get absolutely destroyed by an acid-base question, before a really confusing diagram of atomic orbitals appeared in front of me. For a moment, I thought that some of the symbols on the diagram looked familiar; the label “2p” shone with recognition for a moment, but I was taking too long to understand it, and I was losing time quickly. I started to panic; trying to keep my sanity over the next several minutes felt impossible. I could hear a clock ticking loudly in my head as every second passed, and I started sweating.
Skip… skip… skip… It seemed every part of each question was built directly above another, like a tower of blocks. Every time I was stumped by the very bottom layer, the first block in the tower, the entire thing would come crumbling down explosively.
Skip… skip… skip… the word repeated in my mind like a broken record every time I saw something I didn’t know how to do. Halfway through, however, I started to notice that more questions actually made sense to me. It was like the test had seen me in a state of panic, decided that it felt sympathy for me, and switched to things that I would actually know how to do.
Question 3 was mostly centered around nuclear chemistry, which was probably the only subject outside of AP Chemistry that I had any idea of how to tackle. It was far from perfect, but it succeeded in… er, not plummeting my confidence. That alone felt like a big change.
Despite the obvious fact that I had a lot of room for improvement, I was starting to feel slightly better about things going into Questions 4 and 5. The questions were visibly easier (or at least, they were closer to what I experienced in AP Chemistry). I breezed through the PV=nRT question without batting an eye; the RICE table setup wasn’t too hard either (although I was too rushed to find the actual value of “x”), and a basic explanation on Thermodynamics (which is based on logic). There was a glimmer of hope for a moment– as ill-prepared as I might be for this, I might be able to survive.
Over the last twenty minutes, I switched rapidly between a spark of confidence and a feeling of ruin. A question in Hess’s Law involved me rearranging equations in my head to try and find the answer, but for some reason I just couldn’t do it— my confidence dipped. The question after that involved a basic explanation of Le Chatelier’s Principle, which is one of the most intuitive concepts in chemistry— my confidence spiked. After this was a question on the assignment of oxidation states— easy points. My confidence spiked yet again.
By the time I had written something down for the final question, there were literally a handful of seconds left. There was no time to check, no time for attempting to reason for new questions…
I just had to hope that the questions I answered would be enough to get a respectable score.
0:03
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Celine, Sumedh, MP, and I all looked up from our papers and exchanged glances with one another. A wave of relief washed over me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person who felt crappy about my performance the past hour. Nobody felt good about the test.
“How was it?” We all asked each other. Everyone had basically the same response.
“That was terrible.”
We started to go into this huge, passionate rant session about how badly that test went for us. I came out of that test thinking that there was no possible way that I was going to outscore Sumedh, Celine, or MP. “You all probably did way better than me,” we all kept saying to each other. “I didn’t have any idea what I was doing.”
At that point, I realized that none of these failures was a result of my own stupidity; the test was genuinely hard. If the prodigy Sumedh completed that and said it was difficult even for him, then the test really was no joke. Even the talented and experienced Celine didn’t seem satisfied. Hearing that all the other really smart people on my team struggled through this as well didn’t make me feel better about the results, but it was enough to persuade me to keep going.
Immediately afterwards came the Topics Exam, which would be done in two pairs. Once again, Sumedh and Mayukh would tackle the exam themed around Lasers while Celine and I attempted the test titled “TV and Movies”. The two of us were guided by some of the escorts down the campus to a different lecture hall, a short walk away, where we would be doing our test.
Compared to the room where we had taken our Individual Exam, this one felt a lot emptier… it was far quieter than it had been before. Celine and I both attempted to keep our voices down as we did the exams together, but it was hard to stay silent the whole time. There was too much to laugh at.
The first question referenced Breaking Bad. As soon as I saw it, I recalled one very specific moment from a swim practice I’d had just a few days ago. I remembered walking up to the entrance of the swim deck, talking to Sumedh…
There’s also TV and Movies. What do you think that could be about? I thought it might be electrochemistry or something… something to do with how TVs work, maybe.
Yeah, I think it’s either gonna be Breaking Bad or something about how TV works.
“Sumedh predicted that,” I laughed when we opened the page. “He told me he was pretty sure that the test would have something to do with Breaking Bad.”
We started the test, and it instantly went downhill. The very first question talked about some random Emulsifier, which I understood about as well as I currently understand the language of Swahili (which means I don’t understand it at all). We spent way too much time during this whole test just laughing our heads off, which is in contrast to just about every other test I’ve taken.
If either Celine or I were this clueless on a school test, particularly an AP test (As I write this now, AP Tests just ended), we’d walk out disturbed, feeling this huge sense of regret. For some reason, that sense of hopelessness just didn’t show up today. Maybe it was because the test was just extracurricular. Maybe it was because some of our answers were so hilarious that it was impossible not to laugh. Maybe it was just the fact that we had someone to laugh with. Regardless, it was definitely one of my favorite moments of the trip.
Even with all of the laughable answers, we did eventually pull ourselves together for a few questions on Chromatography (which is the process of separating mixtures based on polarity). The Electrochemistry Question that appeared about a third of the way through the test gave us a bit of a confidence boost; we didn’t get everything right, but it was a far cry from the depressing performance on the Individual Exam that we thought we had at the time.
The only show I ended up recognizing in the remainder of the exam is The Big Bang Theory, which I’d heard of thanks to my brother, who constantly watched Young Sheldon when he was younger. If you look closely enough at the blog, you might even find a reference to his Young Sheldon phase somewhere. We finished the last few questions on the test— a long but intuitive question on equilibrium, the energy of a photon emission, and redox reactions.
We reached the very end with seconds to spare, where they presented us with an extra piece of scratch paper that we never got around to using. I was about to just sit back and let the remaining ten seconds run down (we both knew we weren’t going to have time to realize that we could change anything), so Celine took the scratch paper and made one last contribution: she drew a large, unmissable smiley face on the back.
We both laughed.
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With that, the Topics Exam came to a close, and we submitted our papers before heading out for an hour-long lunch break. We had no idea where Sumedh and MP had gone to take their Topics Exam on lasers; the last time Celine and I had seen them was in the lecture hall with the Individual Exams. After attempting to contact Sumedh and our parents (and not really coordinating anything), Celine and I decided to follow the crowd of WUCT competitors to a nearby building where they were serving lunch.
Lunch wasn’t anything too interesting— all we were given was a single slice of pizza and a bag of chips. We spent the rest of the lunch hour reflecting on the exams and planning what we’d do together as soon as they were over. Celine still really liked the idea of going to the Missouri Botanical Garden, so we decided to visit it the second Breaking Bonds was over.
Towards the end of lunch, we went to a third building on campus for the WUCT Team Exam, where we reunited with Sumedh and MP. We quickly caught up on everything that had happened since we last saw each other— Celine and I briefly recounted the experience of the TV and Movies exam to Sumedh and MP, who then told us that their Lasers Exam had gone well.
They definitely felt a lot more confident about it than me, and Celine did. “We didn’t draw any smiley faces, though,” Sumedh joked, “So we probably won’t get that high of a score.”
With our divide-and-conquer strategy locked and loaded, the exams were passed out, everyone grabbed their pencil and calculator, and we got through the test easily. We finally overcame the problems we’d faced in previous exams with the strength of numbers. Questions and concepts that stumped us previously suddenly became easy… and everything actually made sense. We hit the flow state easily, writing our answers out so quickly that every answer almost felt automatic—
Haha, just kidding. This was easily the worst exam out of the whole bunch. Everyone on our team felt like the people creating the test made sure to add exactly the questions that would confuse us. We split the test in half and divided into pairs again. Celine and I looked at the first problem and instantly felt like we were being mocked.
Out of every possible topic, why did we have to start with Solubility Equilibria? We wrote a handful of random things we thought were relevant to the question before leaving a smiley face, because the grader would definitely see it and decide that earned the points.
The test continued to throw us questions that we had no idea how to tackle. I was starting to feel convinced that I’d get the same score if they wrote every question in Maori, because I really didn’t know how to do any of it. Everyone exchanged papers over the next hour; we inhaled the stuff we knew how to do really quickly, and it was all gone in a matter of minutes. The rest of it we continued to pass around the group for the next forty minutes, we’d tell each other repeatedly, “I don’t know how to do this,” and then give it to someone else, hoping that they could explain it before they too admitted to confusion.
That was hands-down the worst of the exams, and the Breaking Bonds round that followed would only be a slight improvement. After talking things over, we agreed to move forward with our strategy of grinding out packets of medium difficulty, hoping that we’d accumulate enough points to end with a not-so-bad score. We waited for another hour (in which everyone sort of did their own thing) until someone finally approached our group to escort us to the last of the testing rooms, where we would tackle the Breaking Bonds round. This room was the smallest of the four, and yet it was going to hold our team, about three others, and the graders, sitting at their own table, who would be checking every single one of our answers in real time. Our whole group sat in a circle with our calculators prepared, and the timer started once again.
1:00:00
59:59
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Everyone’s score was zero. But not for long…
“Get up- go-” MP jumped out of his seat and went to get the first packet.
“It’s the medium packet, get the medium one!”
MP came back with a sheet of paper containing three questions, and a moment later, four pencils at once were all writing on the paper. There was a buzz of activity, and everyone was rushing to ask one another questions before time ran out. We felt like we were going fast— but we could already see next to us, other teams’ scores were starting to pile up. Was nobody tired after already taking 3 chemistry exams back-to-back?
Fewer and fewer teams showed their score as zero; more and more of them were building up in numbers, and we hadn’t even submitted our first packet yet. Celine would later tell us that she heard the graders at the table point towards our group and ask, “What’s taking them so long? Why haven’t they gotten a point yet?” Half the teams had already gotten points, and we weren’t one of them. I started to feel a sinking pit in my stomach— that feeling when you have when the entire crowd is moving ahead of you, and you’re slow and clumsy and falling behind.
“Did we get decent answers?”
“I think so,”
“Okay, go show it to them.”
“Go! Go! Go!”
MP left the table again and returned with yet another packet. We started again on another one, taking occasional glances at the scoreboard, where the number of teams with zero points was rapidly diminishing. I felt a sting of anxiety at the fear of being left behind. We had Sumedh and Celine— if anything, we should be the best team there! How the hell were we last? By the time we had grabbed another packet and started on it, only a handful of teams— and this was in the lower division— were still at zero.
We submitted another packet and checked the scoreboard again. Several teams had already run miles ahead. I really had no idea what they were even doing, signing up for the easy division. We, on the other hand, had crawled a few feet. To everyone’s great relief, some of the answers from the second packet had finally gone through and accumulated some points. We were still in the back of the crowd, but at least there was progress. We were moving.
The next few packets came and went; the timer fell out of our heads for a while, and everyone focused solely on the packets. Every once in a while, I’d look up at the scoreboard and see that we were starting to catch up. There were quite a few teams there that were so good that it was unrealistic to even dream of ever topping them in this event, but there were others that didn’t seem so out of reach.
We kept going through the medium packets. Many of them we knew how to do, but the pressure of time (which was starting to run low) kept us at a much quicker pace. We were nowhere near perfect; there were several problems that we turned in where we expected to get full points and ended up empty-handed. But our accuracy was good enough to reach roughly in the center of the rankings, which I’d be happy to get after we all got our butts kicked on three consecutive exams.
We reached our tenth medium packet. The clock hit the 5-minute mark, and the rankings were hidden, leaving us with only our thoughts and the fear that gripped all of our minds. 5 minutes was still plenty of time for anyone who we’d passed to come and rob us of our decent position on the leaderboard.
That meant we had to give the rest of the time our all.
And we were going to do exactly that. A multiple choice appeared that we didn’t know how to solve? Screw it. We just put down some random letter that looked decent based on vibes, or the little handful we did know about the topic. The 50 or 33 percent chance was more than worth it compared to wasting another minute going through the calculations. We sped through calculations like flies and submitted a tenth packet.
MP came back with number eleven, which was approached with another very similar “rush-through-and-put-random-BS-if-you-don’t-know-what-you’re-doing” strategy. We didn’t know if we were doing it accurately or if we had a good approach. All we knew was that there were three minutes left, and we were going to grab every last chance we could get.
1:32
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MP came back with a twelfth packet containing another three problems. I took one look at the clock and was pretty sure it would be a miracle if we could legitimately attempt just one problem at that time. The multiple choice was filled in seconds— and we put some quick numbers down— and—
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It was over.
That was it— the end of WUCT 2026. We’d finished all four tests that we had planned for: The Individual, The Pairs, The Group, and Breaking Bonds were all behind us now, and all that was left was to wait for the score. Other than Breaking Bonds, I really had no clue how the results would turn out. I thought I had given it a decent shot, especially given the fact that the last chemistry class I took was AP Chem about a year before.
But that wasn’t my worry. Celine and I wanted to focus on some other very important matters, aka sightseeing. And where else should we start than right where we are? Throughout the stress of all of the exams, neither Celine nor I had much time to pay attention to the scenery of the campus. But now that it’s over…
We could finally look at all of the beautiful buildings we’d passed and ignored; Washington University is probably one of the most aesthetic campuses in the US. I wouldn’t even think of the Midwest when looking at some of these pictures. I’d think this was set in some grand European university, like Oxford or Cambridge. We both wandered around the university
Until we met up again with our parents, at that point, Celine brought up the suggestion again that we try to visit the Botanical Garden, which she had wanted to do for quite a long time anyway— we got in the car and began driving over there shortly afterwards. I remembered to take a few pictures of the view while we were driving, and it’s pretty obvious from this that the red-brick buildings vibe wasn’t just unique to Washington University. The neighborhoods our car traveled through all followed that same architecture. On some streets, I didn’t see anything other than red-brick buildings; it was almost like red-brick buildings were mandated in some areas.
We arrived at the front of the Botanical Garden in the sunset; the building to check-in and the entrance didn’t scream anything too exceptional at first.
What was most interesting about the front of the house was that it was home to a couple of ducks sitting just outside the entrance door. They didn’t really interact with us or do anything interesting; they just sat there and dug their beaks into their bodies. Neither seemed to really care much for all the visitors coming in and out of the garden, because they were about as still as stones. Eventually, we just went inside and bought our pass to the garden.
Spoiler Alert: Celine was very, very right to suggest the Botanical Garden. The tickets were completely worth the little bit of cash we had to pay. As soon as we stepped out of the lobby, I saw plants and these funny works of architecture in every direction. In the distance, I noticed this large dome-like structure, which I guessed probably housed some of the most exotic-looking plants known to man. If you’re just staying here for an hour or two, as we did, don’t expect to cover everything or even the highlights. There were so many different types of plants and pieces of 3D Artwork that it might as well have been endless.
Celine and I started walking around all the sections close to the entrance, picturing every individual flower we could see. There were probably more colors of flowers in this garden than there were colors used in the most complex pieces of artwork. Whenever I scroll through this part of my camera roll, I see a vibrant mess of red, pink, purple, and yellow, with a handful of pictures meant to show the broader view of wherever we were walking around in the garden.
The 3D Art was also pretty impressive; a lot of the structures had this annoying habit of creating optical illusions from certain angles. You’d think that we were looking at some weirdly-positioned cubes in this photo, but the artwork was actually angled specifically to make it appear like a cube from a distance.
After exploring for about thirty minutes, our group realized that we still hadn’t seen whatever was inside that gigantic dome in the distance, so we started slowly moving in that direction (stopping to take pictures of and admire anything we found on the way to the dome, of course)
The inside of the dome was, quite literally, a jungle. The entire thing was just tropical-looking plants in every direction you looked, unless you were looking at the little pathway that they made for visitors to walk on. There were even a handful of vines hanging from the very top of the dome, including this really exotic-looking deep blue colored plant. (which is probably just for decoration) There was also a little mini-waterfall inside. The interior was pretty cool, but it was nothing compared to what we would see in about 40 minutes. (No, I’m not spoiling it. It’s almost here anyway.)
After exiting the dome, we spent the next half hour exploring the gardens behind it, slowly moving deeper and deeper into the botanical garden. We didn’t realize, just yet, what was waiting for us a few hundred steps away.
“Is it time to go yet?” We heard our parents discussing from behind. “I think it’s probably time to go.”
“Yeah, it’s getting dark,” My dad agreed.
“Wait, what’s that over there?” I asked spontaneously, pointing into the distance towards what appeared to be a scenic view of a lake. Before our parents could tell us it was time to leave, Celine and I were already ten meters away.
From far away, the lake didn’t look that big. When looking at it from a distance, I’d initially thought it was just a little pond sitting at the edge of the garden. It turned out that it was one of those things that looks much, much bigger when you see it in person. We walked around the perimeter, taking pictures of the lake as we did. This one probably ended up being my favorite one of the whole trip.
Walking around the lake added thirty, if not more, minutes to our time spent in Missouri’s botanical garden. We watched the sun set beneath the horizon from the side of the lake as it slowly darkened over St. Louis once again. As the sun started to set and we started retracing our path through the garden the way we had entered, the 3D art we had encountered just an hour ago came to life.
Or maybe not life. That’s not the right word. Light. But I’d say it made the evening feel a lot more lively. All of them started to glow in yellow, or red, or blue, or whatever other color looked good in the dark. Some even changed colors; one morphed slowly through every color of the rainbow, so you could get your favorite color if you timed it correctly. Some people (including a certain individual named Celine) took advantage of this.
After a brief encounter with a wedding (which of course was being held in one of the most aesthetic parts of the garden)
We went back through the previous pieces of 3D Art that we had encountered when first entering the garden. I made sure to take them from the same angle as I had before so that we could get this beautiful comparison (which may or may not be very amazing depending on the comparison)
And for one last little interesting picture, those two ducks sitting on the front were, for some reason, still sitting there in the water, as if hours hadn’t passed since we last saw them. I guess they didn’t find our presence irritating anymore, because neither of them buried their faces in their bodies the second we passed by. Both just kind of floated in their pond awkwardly as we took one last picture and headed out for dinner.
Since Celine’s mom had recommended a Chinese restaurant for dinner yesterday, we decided to try one of the few Pho places in St. Louis for our dinner that night. The one we chose is called Grand Bistro, which sat only a few blocks away from the garden. I honestly didn’t expect such a big menu with so much variety; this isn’t Little Saigon, after all…
Nope, it had more than enough variety to keep you occupied for a year. The menu carried just about every major Vietnamese dish; if you can name it, it was probably featured somewhere in the menu. It had pretty much everything.
But we had just gone through a really long day. Four consecutive rounds of a chemistry tournament and the exploration of a huge botanical garden had drained us of all the energy that we had. And the best way to revitalize after that is with a warm, hot bowl of pho that couldn’t come sooner.
But the best kind of pho is the one with a little bit of good seasoning. That is, one with hoisin sauce sprinkled on it. I reached across the table and grabbed the bottle and put some in, then handed it to Celine. She decided to do something a little more interesting with hers.
We ended up parting ways for our trip back to San Diego the next morning. Celine and her mom went on a layover through Austin, Texas once again. My dad and I, meanwhile, went through Sacramento Airport, staying there for just long enough to eat lunch before flying back to San Diego. The next few weeks would return to their usual depressing cycle of waking up, going to school, coming home, studying for AP tests, crashing out, and doing it all over again.
It wasn’t until the end of the month that my mind would retrace back to WUCT again. Celine messaged our group telling everyone that our scores had been released. Here’s my assessment of everything that happened.
Individual: I had spent a lot of time being anxious about how this one had most likely turned out. Every single one of us taking that test had assumed that we were the one who would get the lowest score. It turned out the one person whose instincts were right was, unfortunately, MP. Sumedh had managed to avoid last place. (It was a good run. Don’t forget, you haven’t even taken any chemistry classes yet.) Not to my surprise, the highest-scoring in our school was Celine—she had overtaken me only by a single point.
Topics: It turns out that writing smiley faces on all the questions you don’t know how to do is NOT the best way to approach a test. The combined knowledge of the two most experienced people on our team wasn’t enough to get through TV and Movies. Maybe we should’ve been given Lasers instead, because Sumedh and MP did way better on the topics exam than we did.
Team: This was the most nightmarish of the tests, and its score was the hardest for me to look at. Smiley faces didn’t save us here, either.
Breaking Bonds: To everyone’s relief, the points we gained in the last five minutes of the competition ended up helping us enough to keep us from being last place. No one was surprised that we were nowhere near the top of the list – even in the lower divisions, these teams were really impressive. To be honest, I was just satisfied that we had managed to pull through with a somewhat respectable score. A few teams on the list had gotten scores so low I had trouble believing they were even focused the entire time.
We may not have dominated the competition as I had hoped, but honestly, I’m not too angry about that. The experience itself more than made up for all the defeats we suffered in the great struggle of the WUCT. And it wasn’t just the thrill of finishing the challenge that made the competition so satisfying and enjoyable. It was all sightseeing, too… In only two days, we saw one of the Earth’s best arches, a brilliant botanical garden, a beautiful campus, and an ancient monument unsurpassed for thousands of miles.
It’s not every day that you do so much in two days.
We’ll see soon enough whether the Bahamas can surpass this.
ROYAL CARIBBEAN 2026 COMING SOON.