Featured member - Mehul Arora

We will be featuring different members of the Brilliant community, so that you can get to know them better. For the fifteenth issue, we are featuring Mehul Arora, who despite wanting to do well in the various exams, hates the fact that he has to memorize facts for them.

Tell us more about yourself
Hi! I’m Mehul Arora. I live in Delhi, India. I’m a regular school going chap who loves to solve Math problems. It’s nearly one year that I’ve joined brilliant and that one year has helped me to improve my math skills immensely.
Besides Math, I love sleeping and listening to music. I also read novels. I hate school exams and I love trolls. As far as sports are concerned, I’m a little too lazy to play although I do play Basketball in my free time.

Tell us something that most people do not know about you
I’m a quizzer. I love quizzing. It’s curious to know uncommon things about people we see or hear about in our daily lives. I do all sorts of quizzing from General to Technology.
Also, I play scrabble, at the National level in India. Playing scrabble is fun! :D

What are your plans for the future? Frankly, I’d just like to spend my next few years in studying well, and getting into a good college. I will also aim for cracking the NTSE, NSEJS and The Indian RMO.

What do you hate about exams?
It encourages unnecessary competition between friends. While I agree that there should be friendly competition, I think it's at a level which creates differences between friends.
Also, it encourages Mugging things up. People cram like crazy for exams, and then forget everything after that. If they fail to do well in the exam, they are disappointed and do not know why. Exams should be set in a way that they encourage participation and learning, as opposed to just learning the tricks and shortcuts to doing well on the exam.
Exams are always the most fearful thing in a student’s life, because the short hour can have such an impact on their future.

Why do you think we have exams?
Well, exams exist to check the talent/ potential in a student. They offer a way for a child to judge what field he/she is good in, and also to bring out the best in them. On a national scale, exams are needed to help provide understanding about the relative strengths of each individual.
To a certain extent, exams are necessary. Without exams, most would not bother to learn and study. If conducted appropriately, exams are a rather helpful tool. I don't think we would get rid of exams. Instead, the focus should be for schooling/ studying should be done in such a way so as to help build interest of students in studying and exploring different horizons.

How do you prepare for your exams? Preparation for exams is inevitable. For me, school exams require negligible preparation if attention is paid in the class, and you read chapters on a regular basis.
For competitive exams, well, that’s a thing to bother about. For me, competitive math has never been much of a hindrance, thanks to Brilliant for that. I usually focus on Physics and Chemistry, more of the focus being on Chemistry. While I love studying Chemistry, it's either you know the fact of not. You are unable to work your way through the problem, and brute force and answer out of the setup.

What do you wish for Brilliant?
Brilliant is a wonderful platform for expressing yourself and interacting with many geniuses, and encouraging you to learn more about math and science. I’m simply addicted to Brilliant and wish only that the staff stop changing the interface too frequently and that the wikis get filled up real soon, so that everyone can enjoy the beauty of mathematics!

Markdown	Appears as
`italics` or `_italics_`	italics
`bold` or `__bold__`	bold
- bulleted - list	bulleted list
1. numbered 2. list	numbered list
Note: you must add a full line of space before and after lists for them to show up correctly
paragraph 1 paragraph 2	paragraph 1 paragraph 2
`[example link](https://brilliant.org)`	example link
`> This is a quote`	This is a quote
# I indented these lines # 4 spaces, and now they show # up as a code block. print "hello world"	# I indented these lines # 4 spaces, and now they show # up as a code block. print "hello world"

Math	Appears as
Remember to wrap math in `\(` ... `\)` or `\[` ... `\]` to ensure proper formatting.
`2 \times 3`	$2 \times 3$
`2^{34}`	$2^{34}$
`a_{i-1}`	$a_{i-1}$
`\frac{2}{3}`	$\frac{2}{3}$
`\sqrt{2}`	$\sqrt{2}$
`\sum_{i=1}^3`	$\sum_{i=1}^3$
`\sin \theta`	$\sin \theta$
`\boxed{123}`	$\boxed{123}$

Featured member - Mehul Arora

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