This year, I qualified to participate in the Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament. Our district’s two high school math clubs combined and sent out two teams of eight to venture to Boston for this amazing competition.
As an officer of my school’s math club, I was obligated to manage a few logistical tasks before our departure date. As MIT is about five hours away from home, we organized carpooling and hotel rooming on our own on a Google Spreadsheet to keep track of where everyone would be. Unfortunately, our school does not support the math club with our overnight trips yet, so we had to fund the trip entirely by ourselves. As a result, the cost for each competitor was about $170, which covers the hotel, gas, and registration fees for the competition.
On Friday, I arrived at the front parking lot of my school, where we were all scheduled to meet before departing separately for Boston. As people arrived, I discovered that two of our youngest competitors (both in middle school) had left two hours ago and were in Connecticut already.
After a little communication with the other officers, I waved goodbye and climbed into my carpool for a five-hour car ride. I traveled with two freshmen, Aarush and Monish.
About half an hour in, Aarush started doing math. It was interesting how his dad (who carpooled us) called it “studying”. I followed suit: it was about noon and I was bored after scrolling through Messages and Discord and wasn’t about to take a nap with eleven hours of sleep in my bag. Monish stared at his phone most of the time, but later I realized that he was doing mind-solving exercises from an Olympiad number theory book.
Along the ride, I felt quite rusty with my problem-solving skills, especially after a full week of chaos with my Valentine’s Day fundraiser. I haven’t been doing competitive math seriously ever since AIME, and although I was still able to solve HMMT November problems, I had a feeling that I would struggle with the later half of the much harder, olympiad-style HMMT February problems. Additionally, I focused on coding a little more than math for the past week, especially since I would have a few chances for promotion in the computing olympiad if I were to enhance my college applications.
It was quite funny how someone remarked that you can’t do geometry problems in the car because we laughed out loud when I showed them my beautiful diagram for an HMNT problem #6. The freshmen looped me in to do some number theory when passed New York. I’ve seen the textbook before but never bothered to look at it.
Because I’ve decided to seal my reputation as a math kid going to a math competition, I resorted to doing some cool integrals and romantic sequence problems on the car ride to the hotel. That was quite some calculus as we got closer to the international home of nerds.
We only stopped once for gas along the car ride to Boston, so we arrived at the hotel slightly after Eric (the president of the other school’s math club) did. My roommate, a guy named Erik, handed me my room keys and we proceeded to our room. He went on to code on his Chromebook as soon as we went into our room. I didn’t mind: that’s a nerd’s everyday life.
I thought our hotel room was quite crappy until we figured out that the lights required a separate switch to turn them on. It was then I realized that I could’ve brought my sleeping bag to claim the sofa couch.
During my brief break in my hotel room, I asked a lot about check-in procedures and dinner because everything was buried under uncertainty. When and where are we getting dinner? How are people arriving later like Ishan and Aprameya going to receive their keys? When are we departing?
The answers to these questions remain simple enough that they could’ve been addressed even before we got to Boston.
Except for a carpool two hours late, the majority of the team drove over to the Harvard Science Center, which was where the tournament’s Friday Night Events were hosted. Every year, HMMT hosts numerous mini-events, which enable the nation’s top math competitors to engage in some bonding time. Admittedly, I had quite a bit of fun with some of my teammates, even though I didn’t know them as well as some strong mathletes back home who didn’t make it into the teams this year.
Upon entry, we stole about seven to eight boxes of pizza by sending two separate people to fetch them. We managed to finish all of them (save for a single slice) and scrambled into an event called Estimathon, humorously naming ourselves “Aarush’s Disciples” and forming our team of twelve people (which was way beyond the maximum team capacity). Our best math guy Pavan wanted to win. I just wanted to have the experience.
We had thirty minutes to estimate insanely hard quantities, such as “the amount of olive oil consumed in the United States, in 2022” without any external resources or guidance. The only question that I was reasonably conclusive on was number 10, which would’ve been wrong if Pavan hadn’t corrected my lower bound in time.
We were doing reasonably well until the very last second when a team submitted an unreasonably accurate response to question 11, which demoted our sneaky twelve-person team from third to fourth place. Furthermore, another one of the teams submitted an answer with bound “1e49”, which changed their score to “infinity-squared” points. That was an incredible moment that deserved a sensational moment of applause.
Afterward, I went upstairs with the underclassmen to play (Go) Fish, which was a really hard card game. It took me fifteen minutes to figure out what was going on and the rest of the game trying to remember one single card. The other team of three won against us by a daunting two half-suits. Conclusively, it was a big memory game that stupefied me.
When it was time to go back to the hotel, we bunched up into our carpools. I and the freshmen spent about ten minutes finding where our parent driver was (Aarush suggested north or south LOL). And apparently, Harvard parking is a menace to society.
We got back at around 10 PM and I did my usual evening routine. I was excited about tomorrow’s contest, but I tried to avoid any overly emotional thoughts because it would ruin my sleep routine. Eventually, I fell asleep after half an hour struggling to relax.
