GTF: Hi Victor, how are you? How’s it going at Cambridge?
VL: It’s good. I've met nice people, smart people, which is the important thing, so it's good.
GTF: How did you first get involved in competitions? How old were you?
VL: In my country, Bulgaria, if we're good at a subject, we go to Olympiads. We have incentives to go, so I just started going. I started with biology, and then at some point decided that chemistry is much more interesting to me.
I started in 6th grade, at age 11 or 12. It wasn't called the National “Chemistry” or “Biology” Olympiad, it was one for the “Natural Sciences,” because we didn't study them separately. The next year they split, so I started going to the one for Biology, and a couple of years later to the Chemistry one. For international competitions, it's customary to go in your last two years of high school, so I went when I was 16 and 17.
GTF: How did Olympiads influence your interest in chemistry? Did they help prepare you to study at university?
VL: These kinds of competitions are good because they allow you to determine where you stand. I probably wouldn’t have had that much of an interest if it wasn’t for the competitions, because they force you to study a much broader range of the sciences than you would otherwise. I’m interested in organic chemistry, but because of the Olympiads, I started studying physical chemistry and inorganic and the other branches because you just have to know in order to be good at it.
And almost all of the preparation for competitions is studying by yourself, so I have a lot of experience in that. Here at university, I can look at course topics that are new to me, and study them by myself to get a more detailed understanding.
GTF: What draws you to organic chemistry specifically?
VL: Organic chemistry is the right balance of knowing stuff and thinking about stuff. And it’s also a very important field in general. Most drugs are organic, like 90% of them. Polymer chemistry is part of that, and most new materials are organic polymers. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in it.
A lot of thinking and also a lot of background knowledge required. Organic chemistry is a very broad field, so I’ve decided to settle on photosynthesis of natural products, and reaction design and applications. I’m currently liking research, so I plan on staying for a while in university doing research, and hopefully having my own research group at some point. But everything that I’m going to do, I can easily also do in a pharmaceutical company. All of the skills I gain are very transferable to industry.
GTF: How did your approach to competitions evolve over time? Any advice you’d offer to future competitors?
VL: The first time you go, it’s going to be confusing. You might not have enough time, you might not do particularly well. But once you’ve been there once, you get much better. In chemistry, we have preparatory problems, so we know roughly which topics are going to come up, and we prepare selectively. For other competitions, like the IMChO [International Mendeleev Olympiad in Chemistry], we look at what was given at other competitions that some of the authors write for (for example the All-Russian Olympiad). At some point, you start researching and trying to guess what’s going to come up.
The most important thing for anybody who decides to compete is to never quit. If something seems hard, study more, and at some point it’s not going to be that hard. In the natural sciences you just have to study and work smart and hard at the same time. And never quit, including at the competition itself. There are many people that fail the first day or one problem and they decide, “That’s it, I’m done, I’m not going to continue.” That’s a very bad idea. There’s been times when I’ve screwed up a problem, or an experiment, but I’ve never quit, regardless of how hopeless the situation seemed.
GTF: Do you have a favorite competition memory?
VL: In 2023, the International Chemistry Olympiad was held at ETH Zurich, which is a world-class university. Some very famous chemists came while we were eating and spoke with us! And we did a lot of fun stuff during the Olympiads. When you put a lot of like-minded people in the same place, they’re gonna get along nicely and have fun.
Also, it’s very good to meet people from different countries. They have very different ways of thinking and use very different resources to study, so you can learn a lot from them. And, it’s nice to meet people.
GTF: And what are your hobbies outside of class?
VL: Meeting up with friends, watching TV. I mostly watch comedies and sitcoms, like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, and such – all in all lighthearted and relaxed.
I also play tennis, and am very happy that Trinity College has several courts which are free for use by students.
