Photographer, pianist and winner of the international World Scholar’s Cup – is there anything Nicolas Littler Baird cannot do? Baird excels academically as well as artistically. Friends and family have told him that he should sell his photos.
Baird, 16, has played the piano for seven years now, and photographed for three. His mother, Selina Littler, said it began around fifth grade. That was the point that he was challenged, and that was the point he rose to the occasion.
This past year, as only a sophomore, Baird took an Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus course. As a freshman, he signed up for the Academic Decathalon (Ac Dec) and the Advanced Mathematical Problem Solving club.
According to Baird, it was teachers like Chris Yetman, his teacher and Academic Decathlon (Ac Dec) advisor, who “got me excited about learning.”
Yetman was also Baird’s AP Calculus teacher, so he knew him in a variety of other settings outside of Ac Dec.
Yetman chose Baird to compete on one of the teams from Canyon Del Oro High School in the World Scholar’s Cup in Korea.
“He has a combination of inquisitiveness and willingness to learn, he also has a competitive streak in him and he’s very, very bright,” Yetman said.
The World Scholar’s Cup competition, similar to the Ac Dec competition is still relatively new. It has been around for two years now.
“Although it’s a new competition it’s still a very exciting thing to be the world champions at something,” Yetman said.
The team took third at the Scholar’s Cup at the national level, but won the Scholar’s Cup at the international level. Baird points out that the two teams who beat them at Nationals were not at the international competition.
“There’s a term the kids use when you get a bunch of medals. Nic hadn’t earned that yet. It’s called 'clinkage.' So when he came back from Korea and from nationals, he had acquired clinkage,” Littler said.
The competition features four events in two divisions. There was a high school division and a middle school division. The four events were comprised of an individual multiple choice test (100 questions), an individual essay, a team debate and a team multiple choice test (100 questions).
“I got nervous before the test (the multiple choice test) and definitely the debate, because I’d never done one before nationals so the first one I had done was for the competition at nationals. I was really nervous because I didn’t know what I was doing, but my teammates really helped me prepare for it,” Baird said.
There were 10 countries represented by 31 different teams. There were nine high schools from the United States. Of those, two teams were from Canyon Del Oro. They stayed in a hotel in downtown Seoul.
The group took a trip to the English Village while in Korea, which Baird describes as creepy.
“It was sort of a façade, mock-up of a British village that had houses that all look the same, but on the inside (they) were all falling apart. Nothing really worked right. It was a summer camp place, where they took kids and taught them English,” Baird said.
He said he got a taste of some local flavor as well.
“(I had) some fish blubber that made me break out in hives. It was this grey gelatin stuff. The sushi was amazing, and it was cheap too. All the food was really good. The first time we ate at a traditional Korean restaurant, the waitresses there showed us how to eat (the food). There was a certain kind of giant fish seafood pancake that was made of egg, shrimp and a bunch of other fish. They’d cut it up and dip it in sauce for us, and they almost feed us,” Baird said.
Canyon Del Oro’s principal decided to subsidize the room and board for the trip, with discretionary funds from tax credit donations. They stayed there for nine nights; otherwise it would have been only three nights. The teams arrived five nights before the competition began.
“(The city) was really crowded and tall. At lunch time it was pretty crowded, but at night you could barely walk through the streets. There were street vendors selling strange clothing that had weird English sayings on it. I really want to go back (to Korea). The last day, we went to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. We could look out over the forest, because there are mines and no one goes in there, so there are 40 years of forest. We went to a 15th century palace. All the architecture was still intact. I went into a model replica of the prince’s chambers and got yelled at because I had my shoes on. I didn’t see the sign that said to take them off. It was kind of hit and miss (with the language barrier), like you didn’t know who was going to be able to speak English. Luckily, we never got lost, but we almost lost our teacher in the subway. It was closing and he got stuck in the doors,” Baird said.
Despite his recent successes, Baird is humble about his triumph. Winning was exciting to Baird, but he was more animated about his first trip outside North America.
“Part of me regrets that an American team won because a lot of the schools there did not speak English as a native language. Besides that, I’m really amazed. None of us thought we were going to do all that well,” Baird said.
With his recent accomplishments, Baird is looking towards the future. That future could find Baird at Carlton University in Minnesota, or Stanford in California or Brown in Rhode Island. He is interested in pursuing a career in a science-related field. He used to be keen on biology, but after taking chemistry he is now considering something that can combine chemistry, biology and physics.
For now, he works part-time at the Oracle Historical Society, archiving their photo collection. He also volunteers at the Rancho Linda Vista Oracle Art, filming and editing videos.
In the fall Baird will be completing his junior year in Italy. He is studying abroad for the entire academic year.
He says he owes a lot of his success to superb teachers like Mr. Yetman and also to his parents. His dad is a writer, so he is the one who helped him work on his writing skills, for the essay portion of the competition.
“(We are) very proud, he worked hard for that competition,” Littler said.
