By Serena An

Each year, middle and high school students participate in the American Mathematics Competitions (AMC). After competing in the AMC, the final leg of the AMC program is the Mathematical Olympiad Program (MOP), a three-week intensive summer camp for the top 60 students that qualify for the International Mathematics Olympics (IMO). In order to qualify, middle and high school students participate in the AMC followed by the American Invitational Mathematics Examination and then the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) or the United States of America Junior Mathematical Olympiad (USAJMO). After these competitions, students are selected based on their competition performance to attend the MOP camp to practice and train to potentially participate as a representative of the International Mathematics Olympiad.

After graduating high school, I was a virtual Residential Assistant at MOP last summer alongside Holden Mui. Instead of taking classes and tests, our focus was on organizing activities for students and staff. Holden and I incorporated our virtual and in-person MOP student experiences to enhance the social aspect of camp to the best of our ability.

As an AMC student, I’d like to share more about my experience in the MOP camp and how I helped lead our fun programming while balancing the hard work expected of the program. On a typical weekday, students had a 90-minute class in the morning and either a quiz, test, class, or assembly in the afternoon. Every evening included a 30-minute panel moderated by Po-Shen Loh, the director of MOP; I participated in two of the earlier panels on language learning and the card game, Hanabi. Panels were an opportunity for the entire camp to gather together every night, and after each panel was office hours. Unlike what the name might suggest, office hours didn’t involve doing math; instead, it was a place for staff and students to hold interesting and fun conversations.

Outside of office hours, I also did a 15-minute check-in with each of the 60 students. The hours of chatting went by very quickly, and this was my favorite part of being an RA! I really enjoyed getting to know everyone better, including people I had seen at MOP in the past two years but hadn’t talked to much.

Whenever there was free time, people would often be seen hanging out in Discord, an instant messaging based communications platform where users can share pictures, videos, text, and chat live. The Discord server was the hub of the camp, with text and voice channels for logistics, math, and tons of activities, from movie night to t-shirt designing! Here are just some of the activities that happened:

Hanabi

Hanabi is a cooperative game in which you can see other people’s cards but not your own, and the objective is to play cards from 1 to 5 in order. Throughout camp, we played a lot of Hanabi online. At one point on the first day, there were at least 30 people in voice channels named Hanabi 1, ..., Hanabi 6, Hanabi tau, Hanabi 7, ..., and Hanabi 10. Other popular games at camp included Fish, Tractor, Mafia, Skribbl.io, and Spelling Bee. Because the program was virtual, we incorporated these virtual games to make the camp more interactive. For example, Skribbl.io is an online program that functions like charades and Mafia is a deduction game incorporating game theory and mathematics into the program.

MOP: The Puzzle Hunt

A few weeks before MOP, Evan Chen (Assistant Academic Director) asked if anyone was interested in helping to write a mini puzzle hunt, and Isabella, Sanjana, and I—all MOP ‘20 students—joined the team. Evan had already written a meta puzzle involving test passwords, but we still had to quickly write more puzzles to catch up to Evan’s progress in order to make a full puzzle hunt, which is now publicly available!

Singing Troupe

Holden led and played the piano for Singing Troupe, a group that sang at the talent show. In the first week, we chose the songs “Defying Gravity” (Wicked), “Into the Unknown” (Frozen II), and “Another Day of Sun” (La La Land). Then we rehearsed by splitting into Zoom breakout rooms and singing for each other. In the last week, we recorded our singing individually, and Holden combined all of the videos for the talent show.

Talent Show

The talent show lasted a little over two hours, and the acts included a cello duet, mass SET and For The Win games, a Skribbl-related skit, Celeste and Hanabi speedruns, Singing Troupe, and plank expansion countdown (a head-to-head competition of planking while expanding an algebraic expression, such as (a+b)(b+c)(c+a), although most questions were much more involved!).

That concludes my virtual RA experience! After having graduated from high school and math contests a few months ago, I was really happy to join MOP again as an RA this year. Although there was no perfect substitute for hanging out in the dorm lounge or having spontaneous conversations in the dining hall, we did our best as RAs to help all students feel comfortable and welcomed at MOP.

Serena An is a recent graduate from Brookings High School in South Dakota. In high school, she was a two-time MOP qualifier and EGMO 2021 gold medalist. She also started a local math circle to address the lack of math interest and resources in her town. Serena is currently taking a gap year to study Korean, and afterwards, she plans to enroll at MIT.