About Herdbook
Why this exists, and who's behind it.
A first-time scholar opens the season and immediately drowns. There's an official curriculum, a dozen community sites, someone's abandoned notes, past motions, and a pile of advice threads that contradict each other. Nearly all of it is good. None of it is in one place, and none of it tells you what to do on the first morning.
Herdbook is that first place. The fifteen sections with somewhere to go for each, proper notes on all four events, practice sets that show their working, and the links cut down to the handful worth keeping. Hunting for material shouldn't eat the hours you need for learning it.
Underneath that is a simpler reason. WSC is a strange and generous thing to be part of, and plenty of students who would love it never find the door. Anything that makes a first season cheaper to start makes room for more of them.
Behind Herdbook
My journey began at the Mumbai Regional Round in January 2024, where I won the Jak Khor Trophy for Champion Challenge Scholar and helped my team finish third overall. By September, at the Global Round in Bangkok, I stood on stage as Overall Champion Scholar among scholars from around the world. The year closed at Yale University in November, where I placed fourth overall scholar and third with my team at the Tournament of Champions, adding a first-place finish in History along the way, as well as another first in the Special Area — thirteen trophies and forty-three medals across the three rounds.
Those numbers tell one version of the story. The other lives in midnight hotel lobbies where we quizzed each other on history and literature, and in the dozen countries I came to understand through the students who called them home. Winning mattered. The people beside me mattered more.
For the past two years I have mentored more than fifty students, and set against that, the trophies are nothing. Watching them build those same friendships, earn their own medals and travel to compete for the first time has become its own kind of reward, one I did not expect to matter as much as it does.
That is why Herdbook exists. The World Scholar's Cup gave me far more than it ever asked in return, and passing it on — one scholar at a time, and now to far more than I could reach in person — feels like the only honest way to keep the account open.