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Celina Xu (12): I started fencing because I had a family friend who started doing it and my mom was like, that sounds like a fun sport. You should try it. I was a pretty active kid, so I was trying a lot of sports.

Like a year after I started fencing, COVID hit and I had online fencing and that was honestly pretty rough. I wanted to quit because it was just so boring. But after I came back and started competing more, I actually found a lot of joy. My old coach left and a new coach came and then he, a lot of what he emphasized, was actually loving and enjoying the sport. He was like, you should focus on the process more rather than focusing on like, ‘Oh, I should be winning every battle, like every bout in practice.’ 

What do I really love about this sport? Why is it fun to me? And I do love this sport. It’s really fun to be able to use your brain, but also use it in a way that combines physical and strategic thinking. Even though I practiced less throughout the years, I started enjoying it more. And it’s  the same to my life. For some things, at first I started with, ‘Oh, like I have to do it,’ but then as I kept doing things, I was like, ‘I actually do like it.’ And I find things I enjoy more about it.

I like the whole analyzing part, like, ‘How do I use my strength to beat someone who has different strengths?’ And I really fell in love with that part of it. I guess 3 or 4 years after starting, I struggled a lot with people who are stronger than me, like in terms of physical strength. I would say, I don’t rely a lot on my strength. I rely a lot more on height and speed in terms of fencing. 

But in my private lessons, my coach, I would like ask him a lot, ‘Can you do exercises on rather than forcing my way around the blade?’ It would be out speeding them or getting further from them so they can’t use their strength to overpower me. I remember one competition. I was really proud of myself for being able to get around a lot of opponents who did that.

Fencing is often called physical chess. All sports are strategic to an extent, but fencing is literally just you and someone else on the strip, and you kind of can only rely on your thinking. A lot of the strategy comes from like, once I’m down, how do I not talk down on myself? How do I just ignore the score and just pretend the score is zero zero and keep going? At the end of the day, you can be as skilled as you want at one thing. But I think, whether or not you do something well is a lot on confidence and being able to overcome bad things.

Close friend Joy Hu (12): She’s able to embody so many different things at once. She doesn’t do anything because she’s forced to do it, but really, it all comes from this very genuine, very authentic place of interest. And I think because she does everything with such enjoyment, and genuine curiosity, she’s able to achieve so many things but also be a very positive role model while doing it as well.

Celina: This one club was not really a club, but an organization, USAYPT. The United States of America Youth Physicists Tournament. It’s a competition, an international competition. You have four research problems. You do experiments on the problem wherever you see fit. And then also, there’s a theoretical component.

I like seeing how that translates to the real world. So my problem right now, I’ll just explain it. When you wrap a rope around a pole when you pull with tension on one side, the tension on the other side exponentially increases by whatever the equation is. I think it’s really interesting to see how does it deviate from the equation because you have to make a lot of assumptions for the actual equation. For example, you assume the rope is massless, you assume there’s no elasticity in the rope, but in reality that’s not true. And I think it’s really fun to explore, like where these deviations come from and like, why.

When I first joined, I was like, ‘This just seems like a fun physics thing to do,’ but I think I got a really good friend group out of that and a lot of people who I talk to every day and that’s just something I wouldn’t have ever expected. Talking to them made me realize you can still have fun while doing hard things.

Community and the people I surround myself with are the most important. I find that finding the right group of people or finding the people who speak to you the most is, no matter what you do in life, that’s the most constant that’s ever going to be there.

USAYPT Team Member Aman Chandra (12): In the first year when I did the tournament, she was my team captain. She was the one that brought me into this and kind of made me really passionate about this as well. She works really hard to make what she does enjoyable, and that is kind of one of the best qualities that you have. Because if you enjoy what you’re doing, then you have the ability to do it really well and really, really want to do it. That liveliness, her energy is what brings many other people to the physics program. And I guess that her energy is also probably what helps her in fencing so much as well. 

Celina: At first, I was also kind of that shy kid who didn’t really ask for help from my coaches at all. But over time, I think what really helped was going to competitions and realizing that even though I’m the one competing, I can still use the people around me and the coaches around me and ask them for help. Even in practice sometimes, a lot of the younger kids started asking me for a lot of help because there’s a lot of things that just come from experience. And I would like to help them in whatever way I can. 

Economics Teacher Sam Lepler: She has the perfect balance between working hard and having fun. She has that sense of humor and curiosity and passion for learning that has nothing to do with the grade. And she has the work ethic and the intelligence and the academic acumen. That’s the balance that she has that makes her amazing. 

Celina: Being able to enjoy life regardless of what’s happening around you. My philosophy is no matter what’s happening, you really can’t control that. The only thing you can control is how you choose to react to it and how you choose to live. So why not choose to live happily, or in a way that feels right to you?