From August 1 to August 7, Blagoevgrad (Bulgaria) hosted the 29th International Mathematics Competition (IMC) for university students. More than 650 participants from Russia, Australia, Israel, the Netherlands and other countries competed. The 吃瓜官网 team, with 6 students from the and brought home six medals: two gold, one silver, and three bronze.
Danila Belousov, one of the leaders of the University team and a graduate student at the NSU MMD, talked about the team,
Every year we hold an open competition for participation in the IMC. This consists of several Olympiads and based on these results the best participants are invited to the team. Past accomplishments do not matter. This year, after the selection, we held summer camps two weeks before the IMC to help students gain practical skills, give advice, and highlight what is important to pay attention to. Starting next year, we plan to organize regular classes so students have an opportunity to engage in Olympiad preparation throughout the academic year and this will help them be selected for the team. The students selected this year using this system had wonderful results with everyone on the team taking home a medal. All well done.
Alexander Tarasenko participated in IMC for the second time. The main training took place during the second semester of the third year and consisted of solving problems from previous Olympiads as well as tasks from similar competitions. All his efforts paid off when Alexander became a silver medalist. He does not plan to stop there and will continue to challenge himself at the IMC next season.
Tarasenko described his background and interests,
I realized that I want to seriously engage in student Olympiads after I participated in one. I was poorly prepared for it and did not perform well but I really liked the process of working on non-standard tasks, looking at them from different angles. Also, working with Olympiad problems develops a deeper understanding of the sections of mathematics that we study at the University so the Olympiad experience can greatly help in research or industry.
Early we shared the opinion of the MMD student from China why she chose NSU to study in.
