When did you get started with Math Circles of Chicago?

‍My parents found the program back when I was in fifth grade. I knew I liked math, and I wanted to explore it, but I just didn’t know how. A lot of math programs are about being quick at math, but math circles are a great way to take an hour or two and really focus on one topic.

You were involved with QED, our math research symposium, from a young age. What was that experience like?

When I got involved with QED, that especially helped me. I did some pretty cool research just as a sixth grader. It maybe wasn’t the best research I’ve ever done, but I found that it was a lot of fun. I learned from that experience that I wanted to focus on questions and spend months thinking about them. Now I’m studying material science engineering at MIT, but this initial QED experience taught me about the kind of atmosphere I was looking for in college.

Our research pathway also encourages students to go to other math programs during the summer. Did you have an experience at a summer math program meeting other young enthusiasts?

Math Circles of Chicago encourages you to do more than just pure math and writing things on a board, they want you to use your hands to understand a problem and work it out with other people. I did an international math camp in Poland called Math Beyond Limits. It was taught by math professors with really unique teaching styles, and gave me a lot of perspective on how I wanted to teach.

After you finished high school in Ukraine you returned to Chicago to work as a High School Assistant (HSA) in our education pathway. What inspired you to apply for this teaching position?

I was tutoring middle school students in a math contest focused camp. This gave me experience working with students of that age. One of the rounds of the contest gave students problems to solve, but they had to present their solutions orally rather than just a pure test. We were allowed to ask them leading questions if they were close to an answer but not quite there. When I saw kids have really smart ideas that they formulated in their own words without formal language, it was really exciting. Math Circles of Chicago encourages students to do the same thing and have agency and ownership of the mathematical ideas they are discovering.

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