2015 Math Olympiad

Yes, I know that this event happened more than a year ago, but this was a very special moment in my life. Here is the background piece of the story:

I participated in a competition last year, on May 7th, 2015 that changed my life. This

competition is called the Math Olympiad with more than 12 sites and about 52 schools participating throughout Washington. This event is hosted by WSMC (Washington State Math Council).

I have always had a passion for math, and I worked on math related things everyday. As preparation for this competition, my team met every Saturday of the year since the end of October. We moved around a lot to find meeting rooms that were vacant so we could use it. The meetings were all fun, we did all kinds of math problems, watched videos, read books, and many other things to help us strengthen our math abilities. After meetings, we ate snacks and chatted with each other until everyone's’ parents arrived. The Math Olympiad also had a t-shirt designing competition, and we consulted to each other briefly about our ideas.

On the day of the competition, we all felt confident about it. The competition is divided into 2 parts, Session 1 and Session 2. The Session 1 test is a long session problem that relates to the real world, meaning it’s based on an issue in society, and the Session 2 test is then split into 5 more categories, Number Sense, Measurement, Geometry, Probability/Statistics, and Algebra. We made sure that we had all of our necessary materials (calculators, pencils, erasers, etc.) and waited for the opening ceremony. After a few minutes, the site organizer came and started her opening speech.

My Design (front)

Teammate's Design (back)

After the speech, she announced the t-shirt designing winners, and my design won for the front side, and my teammate’s design won for the back side. This was very surprising because there are only 2 t-shirt design winners, and the winners were both on my team.

After the announcements, the competitions started. We went to the gymnasium while other grade leveled people went to other places for their tests. The first test that we had to take was the Session 1 problem. We were given an allowed time of 1 hour exactly, but everything was simple for us so we finished with more than 30 minutes to spare. Then, when everyone finally turned in their test papers, we went outside for a 15 minute break. When the break was over, we entered the gym again for the start of the Session 2 tests. We did the first 3 with 5 minutes in between each one, had a 10 minute break afterwards, then finished the last 2 with the same break policy. We finished each one with a lot of time to spare, averaging out to about 10 minutes each. They were all  easy, so we were all very confident about our results.

When all of the testing have finished, we went back to the commons of the school to eat lunch. We had ordered pizza, and we had a chat with our parents about our thoughts on the competition. Shortly after lunch, the host came in again and she started the awards ceremony. A feeling of nervousness fell upon us, until finally the award section of our grade. Turns out, we got 2 superior medals, one for session 1 and one for session 2. Superior medals are the best type of awards that participants can acquire. It means that these competitors scored 80% or better, and that's what happened for both sessions. We took lots of pictures and my team and their parents were all very happy. This event is particularly important to me because it showed me that we have the ability of winning and achieving great things, and what we actually need is to try hard so that we can actually use this ability.

Me (middle) and my team with our medals that we got from the competition.

This is one event that is very important to me, and I want to share it with everyone to see what I have experienced and I hope you enjoyed learning about the Math Olympiad. But, this is only 1 of the many other life changing events that I have. :)

Sincerely,

Erik Ma