I felt really sad reading this. I did mathematics contests at school - a team contest where our school's team reached the final and maths olympiads, where I did

I felt really sad reading this. I did mathematics contests at school - a team contest where our school's team reached the final and maths olympiads, where I did well enough to go to the IMO selection session. I loved them and have lots of fond memories of them. I wanted to do well obviously, but mostly did them because they were fun and loved beautiful mathematics problems and trying to solve them. I wonder if part of the difference is that universities here in the UK aren't too worried by extracurriculars, especially for maths and science subjects. I don't think my participation in contests was a factor in getting a place at Oxford - only the exams and to a lesser extent the interviews were. There's a short section on your general university application form where you write about such things, but unless you write something totally daft, it's general not a big factor. I interviewed people applying to Oxford for maths one year, and we really didn't pay any attention to the candidates' 'personal statements', although if any had been remarkable I guess we might have noticed. My mother was the maths admissions tutor at Imperial for years, and again they really didn't worry too much either - they cared about A-level grades mostly.