How can I prepare for International Math Olympiad Exams ?

How can I prepare for International Math Olympiad Exams ? - Part 3

Do you want to self prepare or seek Math Olympiad Online Training ?

In the previous post, we saw about Math Olympiad Exam preparation and setting the milestones right. In this post we’ll see about self preparation vs getting Math Olympiad Online Training.

For students who would like to self prepare for Math Olympiads and do not prefer math olympiad traning, there are plenty of resources available online. Many of them are free and a few are worth paying for.

Start with the goal in mind. What would be your goal in 1 year or 2 years or 3 years from now ?. Set your goal ambitiously so that your time is worth it.
The late US president John F. Kennedy said this when US moon misson was successful– “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy, but because they are hard“. There are plenty of math olympiad competitions and International Math exams conducted every year. But not all are of high calibre
and promotes critical math thinking. Choose them wisely and set them as your goal to crack some of those olympiads.

The best way to self prepare is to download the previous year
questions asked in those math olympiads and try them out. Often, those olympiad organizers also provide full solution to their past year problems, sometimes for free and sometimes you may
have to pay for it. But make sure that you surround yourself with quality problems that induce mathematical out of the box thinking in you.

Some of the best Math Olympiads :
India : NMTC
USA : AMC
UK : UKMT
South Africa : SAMF
Europe : Kangaroo

(Disclaimer:The author is not affiliated to any of these olympiads organizing teams at the time of this writing, but merely suggesting these olympiads based on personal experience solving innumerable
number of problems that had appeared in these olympiads).

If you are someone who learns by interaction,mentorship in the form of Math Olympiad online training would work very well. If you like to derive some motivation and passion for math from others, a mentor can transmit that to you subconciously by his or her sheer passion and love for math. You would also be able to bounce of different ideas and also get some encouragement to tackle hard problems and sometimes we all need a little push from the outside to realize our full potential. A mentor can help you significantly. To make your Math Olympiad Online Training successful, make sure that you find a mentor who understands your goals and aspirations and willing to work with you at your level of understanding and gradually helps you increase your math solving ability significantly.

A person may be a subject expert but not necessarily a great mentor. Often times, a math expert with a poor understanding of the student’s needs always fare poor compared to a person who is not a subject expert but has the passion and spirit to work along with the student and make the student’s goal as his or her goal. Having said that, it is also extremely important that your mentor is quite capable of solving most problems that you are trying to learn to solve. However nice a mentor may be at a personal level, the technical capability required cannot be under estimated when it comes to learning math.

My advice to students looking for math olympiad online training, is to try a few mentors and make use of trial classes and spend a few classes and see if you see a good match. Do not hesitate to politely inform your mentor that you need a break for sometime and keep exploring more options until you find someone who really has the math competency as well as the mindset to understand your goals and match your level of understanding. It is not about money that gets wasted, more importantly it is your valuable time that matters the most.

The author can be reached via whatsapp +91-8825693840.
Author’s LinkedIn profile is https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbhasky/
Don’t miss to visit the website https://www.MathOlympiadOnline.com to learn more about his online training for Math Olympiads.