Now that Glen knew that what he called the proverbial sacrifices to the Hindu mathletics gods weren't in vain, he became interested in following every single one of them in his life as a retired superintendent, on top of following the VAs in the present. And, of course, helping Trillian run her nonprofit. That nonprofit has not only online resources, as well as news, but also took over the management of the Venomous Agenda Classic.
As for the movie deal, the parish agreed to allow scenes to be filmed at VA, during actual VAs' math team practices, and the resulting film is loosely based on Trillian's life up to this point, but the movie instead portrayed race and gender as being much bigger obstacles for the protagonist than was the case for Trillian in reality, as opposed to isolation and, to a lesser extent, poverty. However, it was ultimately a low budget movie, with Trillian's father becoming a screenwriter. However, as a screenwriter, his work is widely considered genre or niche, depending on how one views the result.
The town has seen its share of academic team stars so many schools across the country could only dream of, and certainly in rural areas. But for a town that's intensely devoted to its academic team stars, most residents took for granted that they will go on to college and their adult lives would still command some measure of respect. By and large, they do. However, no one took a more active interest in them than the people who taught them, and Glen.
For years, he kept a log of who does what among those past stars, and his own children along with them, in chronological order of graduation. And there's a lot of them for him to cover. Which meant the lengthy log began with Jonah, and each alum should be covered as succinctly as possible, education and career.
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Jonah, the oldest child, became an ergonomic assessor and peddled ergonomic assessments across southwest Louisiana.
Dexter, the middle child, graduated from Tulane and ended up working as a corporate recruiter in New Orleans, living a comfortable (If not necessarily the most affluent) life in Uptown.
Éliane gave up on mathletics in college and ended up going into medicine, and returning to Louisiana to do so, practicing family medicine.
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Oh God, Gen. She will always have a special place in my heart, because she played a much bigger role than Éliane in blazing the trail, and breaking the ground, that led to the VAs becoming a household name in mathletics, especially for girls, Glen now seems to struggle to write her entry in the log, given just how Gen was seemingly the reason why he so fanatically made the school, and later the parish, pursue mathletic glory during all these years. No matter what he would even want to write about Gen, it would certainly be more detailed than for most people in this log.
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As manic as Gen was in her own pursuit of mathletic glory, she saw both sides of it: first as one of the top female contestants on the Putnam (a collegiate mathletic contest), and later as a deputy team leader at the EGMO when Jennifer competed, and as a team leader when Trillian did so for the first time. As a mathematician, she won several accolades, both as an undergraduate at Harvard and in graduate school at MIT. She ultimately devoted her research to numerical analysis and taught at Tulane, but only seemed to want to get involved with the EGMO if VAs competed.
As for Krista, who became a bitter mathletic rival of Gen in college, she was instead drawn to mathematical physics. However, unlike Gen, she worked in the defense industry after defending her dissertation.
Marcia, on the other hand, gave up on mathletics in college, and worked in investment banking after playing four years of quiz bowl for the UPenn Quakers, and majoring in math, despite not graduating from Wharton.
Imélie wound up being the only good player on the Tulane Green Wave's quiz bowl team as an undergraduate, also giving up on mathletics, and later work as an AI developer in New Orleans. In business school, she became a player-coach for Tulane, and she remained involved in the Louisiana quiz bowl circuit for years after graduating from B-school.
Jennifer didn't seem to have as remarkable a career trajectory as Gen, but still earned a PhD in math from Berkeley nonetheless, focusing on algebraic combinatorics.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Sadie is perhaps more atypical in that the Russian authorities essentially allowed her to finish her PhD at Moscow State after it started at Princeton, in exchange of which she would teach American studies at Moscow State and coach its quiz bowl team, holding a chair paid for by the military.
Joe (who was Sadie's partner in debates), like Marcia before him, ended up working in investment banking and then moving into corporate banking.
Cristiano, like Imélie, ended up both playing quiz bowl for Carnegie Mellon in college and working as an AI developer. Just not working in the same region.
Even though, as a policy debater, Rebecca has, compared to the majority of the names on this log, mostly flown under the town's radar, she still managed to work for PwC as a consultant after graduation, and then become a corporate controller.
Her debate partner, Jarod, decided to go into the civil service after graduation from the University of Maryland.
Nicole went to Tulane for college but went on to live an unremarkable life as a math teacher at a high school in rural Louisiana. However, it was not in her childhood parish.
Chantal, while being much better-known for her devotion to international affairs than for math, became a well-respected international economist, an expert on the economics of the developing world.
After graduating from Connecticut College, Daisy attended Notre Dame for law school on a full-tuition scholarship, turning down Cornell and Georgetown, and practicing bankruptcy law after graduation.
Gaston, on the other hand, went to the Peace Corps after college, and later on, entered politics, with mixed results.
Anna kept playing quiz bowl at Chicago for undergrad, and Columbia at the PhD level. She became a child psychologist specialized in gifted youth, along with twice exceptional youth.
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Oh God, Valerie made me live a 4-year-long roller coaster when she was in high school. Because of that, it's harder to write about my daughter in this log. She still resents me over her high school days... Glen has flashbacks of this spectacular failure on the third day of the TSTST that led the couple to fly to Pittsburgh to tend to her panic attack.
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Valerie kept competing in mathletics in college at Caltech but, disillusioned with life as a mathematician, she decided to work for a venture capital firm in Los Angeles, and remain in the venture capital world, while moving into a different firm once she earned her MBA.
Faith, on the other hand, did what so many math whizzes at Stanford ended up doing after graduation: working in Silicon Valley as some sort of computer engineer.
Salome was seemingly happy enough with her mathletic track record to attend Tulane, major in statistics and then go on to work as a data scientist in the energy sector.
Myriam is part of that group that makes the VAs continue producing collegiate quiz bowl players, playing for Brown as an undergraduate, and then go on to become an economist.
Even though Blythe is not a VA, I still count her among the girls the parish proverbially sacrificed to the Hindu gods of mathletics! So she will be in the log regardless, Glen prays before writing down a few lines about Blythe.
As Lacassine's valedictorian the year she graduated, Blythe proceeded to attend Tulane and major in chemical engineering.
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Glen then takes a deep breath because it has come to this final moment, he wants the entry covering Trillian to reflect what he made the parish work so hard for years to obtain. When he starts writing:
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Trillian competed twice at the IMO, winning gold twice, but choking at the USAMO senior year cost her a third participation at both the EGMO and the IMO. She ended up becoming a superb mathlete at MIT in undergrad, while her strong performances at the Putnam also made her remain one of the most iconic female mascots of mathematics well into college. She, too, followed a very similar trajectory to Gen in graduate school, but instead of doing numerical analysis, she devoted herself to topology at Princeton. As of this writing, she is still in graduate school...
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And one must not forget what was happening to student life in the parish after the parish's school district started opening up to foreign exchange students.
Foreign exchange students tended to be split into two camps: those who went there for cultural reasons and whose who went there for specific extracurriculars not available at home. Especially for quiz bowl and debates, and often one or two per year apiece, but on occasion sports, such as football. Glen and Selena hosted one on certain years.
Some of the most memorable foreign exchange students at VA included a Bryansk #3 kid who somehow managed to play free safety in football and quiz bowl. He was the only VA quiz bowler in history to also play football. And he also played at the HSNCT for Bryansk #3 in 2039 as a ninth-grader, and for the VAs as a tenth-grader in 2040. (Russian secondary education went only up to grade 11).
Another memorable exchange student was an international extemper who was described by VA's principal as being strong in international topics and weak in domestic topics, and hence much like Chantal's ninth-grader self.
All in all, hosting foreign exchange students allowed the rest of the parish to gain more cultural awareness, as well as raise academic expectations, so it had a mostly positive impact. However, some principals, especially those of Hathaway, Welsh and Lake Arthur, requested systematically and specifically, year after year, a mathlete on the student exchange market, with mixed results.