A prime motivation for STEMS was the fact that, to us, competitive exams that one faces in high school seemed to be totally unrelated to the kind of problems one would need to tackle when working as a researcher. While one works on an open problem, they have access to all the resources they can lay their hands on. Textbooks, articles, old papers, even the Internet is fair game! This seems almost antithetical to what students usually get tested on: their ability to recall something from memory. So we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. We painstakingly created question papers that can withstand enthusiastic problem solvers armed with the Internet, that too for an entire 6 hours! We only had to relent on one thing: No collaboration, for this was still a test of individual skill. Additionally, you get a chance to interact with some of the best mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists from some of the best research institutes in India in the fully funded camps at CMI!