I’m currently a sophomore in high school, so I will be applying for MIT PRIMES USA this fall. As I still have some time until I apply, I was hoping for some advice in terms of prerequisites.
I’ve already seen this page: http://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/reading.php , but I had some questions beyond that.
Should we have a strong base in all of this material by the time we apply?
If we self-study this via MIT OCW, does it still count as having done it?
What is the acceptance rate for the program?
Do they only want students who have a high success rate in math competitions? i.e. will they only take AIME/USA(J)MO qualifiers?
How much weight do they give to the admissions test in the whole application? ie vs your previous achievements
Finally, if you know a decent amount about the type of people who get into this program, do you mind PMing me? I’d really like to run my past achievements by someone to see if it’s worth applying.
Overall, I’m really motivated to self study material. If someone could give me some insight into these questions, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!
Never attended MIT PRIMES (or done math research), but I do have some experience with math contests.
I’ve heard that math contests and research are pretty different, so I don’t think that they’ll only take people who’ve succeeded in competitions, because being good at one does not guarantee being good at another. A decent amount of contest-solving is “tricks” and they are all guaranteed to be solvable, unlike research problems.
However, they might prefer qualifiers because it’s a quantifiable guarantee of what you know. Plus, people who are good at contests almost definitely know a lot more math than people who don’t really do contests. I’m on the low end of USAMO qualifiers, especially in terms of knowledge, but even I have seen a lot of topics on the reading list. A lot of my friends probably would already know and have experience with most of this stuff despite being in grade 9 or whatever. Thus, being good at contests is probably a strong indicator because these people already have a a lot of experience and a strong understanding.
However, just because you aren’t a qualifier, don’t give up. Anyone can learn knowledge. Just be aware that you might have a harder time or need to work harder than qualifiers because you have more information to catch up on. Shouldn’t be a problem if you really love math though. Just make sure it’s something you really want to do because reading alumni stories it seems like a pretty big time commitment.
also I picked up off the site: “Female students, minorities, and students from underprivileged groups are strongly encouraged to apply. PRIMES makes a special effort to reach out to schools in disadvantaged areas.”
given that these types of students are less likely to have even done any contests, don’t stress too much