After a busy year, Lu Zhou could finally relax at home.
The US mathematical modeling competition was happening, but he did not participate. First of all, he did not have a team. Secondly, this type of competition was not worthy of his time.
He had already received the Higher Education Society Cup, so he would not gain anything from this applied mathematics competition.
Also, he had recently won the "Best Young Speaker Award" from the academic conference, and that was way more valuable than the championship from the US Competition.
He decided to let the low-level players compete amongst themselves.
If he was going to join a competition, it would be something like the International Genetic Engineering Machine (iGEM) or the International College Robotics Challenge (ICRA) where it was both fun and realistic.