Our Story


A Brief Description of Our Team, Mission, and Core Values

Our Team

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Max Chen
Mu Alpha Theta President

Max is a senior at IMSA. He enjoys playing guitar, tennis, and debate. Outside of Mu Alpha Theta, Max can often be spotted procrastinating at his desk, walking around campus, or studying in random classrooms. In his freetime, he enjoys pestering his wing mates and watching anime.

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William Yu
JHMC Math Chair

Will is a senior at IMSA. His favorite area of competition mathematics is counting and probability. Aside from math, he lifts weights, plays the piano, and does chess puzzles. On quiet nights, he enjoys the sound of rain, cicadas, and power lines. When he’s not doing work, he can be seen taking naps, listening to music, or reading manga.

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Michael Meng
JHMC Chair

Michael is a senior at IMSA. His favorite subject is computational geometry. Apart from whatever JHMC stuff he's doing, Michael can often be seen walking between clubs or waiting for the microwave. While away from IMSA, he enjoys playing videogames with friends, cooking, and running on a treadmill.

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Kelsie Li
MAO Rep

Kelsie is a junior this year at IMSA. She enjoys chasing around soccer balls in the warm weather and going on bike rides with her friends and family. Her love for the field of mathematics motivates her learning and she always enjoys cracking a good ol’ math pun. On any random Wednesday night (if she’s not cramming for an essay the next day) you might find her playing guitar or going for a jog in the pitch dark — “Nothing beats the thrill of not knowing if your next step will be your last”.

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Andrew Zhu
Math Assistant Chair

Hi, I'm Andrew. I'm one of MAO's Math Chairs helping run the JHMC. Previously, I've taken the AIME and taken first place at the ICTM State Math Contest. Outside of school, I like to run track, play soccer and play games. My goals for JHMC are to make it into a national level exam, and inspire students to enjoy math.

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Skyelar Reuter
JHMC Assistant Chair

Skyelar is a junior at IMSA. Outside of math, she enjoys chess, dance, debate, and golf! Skyelar has a deep love for penguins and hopes to adopt one someday. 🐧 Her favorite topic in math is complex numbers

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Claire Wen
MAO Rep

I'm Claire, a junior at IMSA. I have a deep passion for exploring math, always diving into new concepts and solving complex problems. In my free time, you can catch me dancing in the Student Union (Stunion) with my friends choregraphing dances, studying at the Old Caf, or checking out books at the IRC. Whether I'm immersed in my studies or expressing myself through dance, I'm always positive and enjoying life!

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Roy Wang
Math Assistant Chair

Roy is a junior at IMSA who has memorized more than 100 digits of pi. In addition to math, he enjoys basketball, clarinet, and table tennis. He can often be spotted studying in his room, procrastinating in the main building, or hanging out with friends.

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Drew Wang
JHMC Assistant Chair

Drew is a junior at IMSA. He loves exploring concepts in mathematics and physics. In the spring and summertime you can find him outdoors smashing tennis balls. In his free time, he plays mobile games and pumps metal. He loves to devour eggs and catch his friends lacking. On a Friday night you can catch him running while blasting "Eye of the Tiger."

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Karthik Prasad
MAO Rep

I'm Karthik, a junior at IMSA. My interests lie in mathematical physics (so topics like Differential Geometry and Quantum Field Theory), and I'm excited to make JHMC a success!

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Aarav Shah
JHMC Assistant Chair

Aarav Shah is a junior at the Illinois Math and Science Academy. He has always been passionate about math and especially loves helping others develop excitement for his favorite subject. He hopes to go into computer science. In his free time, he loves to play chess, where he consistently competes in state or national level tournaments.

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Our Mission

What needs must be addressed?

Ever since the first IMSA JHMC was held decades ago, our mission and core values have remained unchanged. We continue to believe that middle school is an oft-neglected but critical formative period for STEM-oriented students, during which a student's positive or negative experiences have an outsize impact on their future educational attainment. This is backed up by results from peer-reviewed studies: for example, Wang and Goldschmidt 2003 finds that differences in mathematical opportunities during middle school translates to increasing educational inequity into high school.

We believe that creating more opportunities for students to have positive experiences with mathematics will not only increase equity for disadvantaged students but also translate into better academic and career outcomes across the board for all participants. This is a deeply personal issue for many of us: almost all of the contest organizers are where we are today in no small part due to opportunities like MATHCOUNTS and the AMC 8, which gave us an outlet to have fun with STEM.

How do we improve on existing programs?

We believe that an effective mathematics outreach program has two key traits: first, it makes math fun, and second, it gives students the opportunity to discover deep insights on their own. We believe that this second trait can't be achieved by simply "skimming the surface" of mathematics: while the gems of discovery might not be buried deep, students need to seek them out in extended problem-solving experiences, experiences which contests like the AMC 8 don't provide.

Hence, we seek to expand on more conventional contest-math rounds in JHMC by diving deeper with our unique Creative Thinking round, where students solve short sets of themed problems extending beyond the normal middle school curriculum. This lets students discover deeper insights than what other middle school contests provide. We believe that this opportunity, provided during the critical time of middle school, among the relatively few nationwide math contests targeting this demographic, will significantly benefit both the math community and our country at large.

For the foregoing reasons, we have decided on the following for the JHMC mission statement:

"The IMSA Junior High Mathematics Competition aims to foster genuine interest in STEM by providing high-quality, intriguing problems across a wide breadth and depth to a diverse community of students at the middle school level."

Our Values

Our core values are the heart of our competition, making it the best it could possibly be.

  • Accessibility: We want this opportunity to be accessible to students from around the country, giving everyone an equal chance to succeed. No matter where you're from or where you're at in your mathematics journey, we want you to feel welcome at the Junior High Mathematics Competition.
  • Community: We want to both be one integral part of the larger middle-school mathematics community and develop our own sense of family around JHMC. We hope to foster a shared love of mathematics to bring people closer together.
  • Quality: We work hard to ensure that our questions are suitable for this competition, hitting the sweet spot in terms of difficulty so that this contest is both enjoyable and enriching for participants of all levels.