Marksman Advances in Physics Olympiad

Darren Xi ’22 reached the second round of the virtual U.S. Physics Olympiad, one of only about 350 students nationwide to do so.

“It takes discipline and postponing the immediate rewards of the easy in order to self-study your way to this level of the Olympiad,” said Doug Rummel, Founders’ Master Teaching Chair and member of St. Mark’s Science Department.

Darren was first drawn to physics in Mr. Rummel’s eight-grade physics class. “Being one step closer to understanding the world that I live in is very addictive, and I have been hooked since Mr. Rummel’s class,” Darren said. This introductory class has been the only physics course Darren has taken so far at St. Mark’s, learning the rest on his own.

As part of his preparation for the Olympiad, Darren used one of his father’s textbooks. “I began to seriously prepare specifically for this exam about a year ago,” Darren said. “My father has a Chinese physics textbook full of practice problems, so he would translate the problems and I would do them.”

To reach this stage of the competition, Darren had to score among the top students on the “F=ma Exam,” which included physical problems like: “A conical pendulum of length d swings in a horizontal circle of radius r. If w is the angular frequency of this motion, what is w²?"

Later in April, Darren will compete in the finals, which feature more difficult questions from a wide range of physics topics, including thermodynamics, relativity, and atomic physics. From there, the top finalists will move on to a rigorous national training camp, where the top five students will be selected to represent the United States at the International Physics Olympiad.