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How to make the most out of MOP – Power Overwhelming

blog.evanchen.cc · 1,526 words · saved by 1 readers

I had a student at MOP ask me something equivalent to “how should I study while at MOP?”1 For those of you that don’t know, MOP is the three-week summer camp for the USA’s team to the IMO. At first I was going to just link my FAQ. But then I thought about it a bit more, and I was surprised to find that my answer was not the same as the general how-to-study FAQ. The additional condition “while at MOP” was enough to cause me to stay up that night writing an entirely different answer. That answer is this blog post. There’s a misconception2 that MOP students are going to improve a ton by locking themselves in their room and working intensely for the whole camp, and come away suddenly much stronger. There’s a reason this can’t possibly work: MOP is only 3 weeks long. You cannot just put a sudden spike in intensity for that short of a period of time and expect to suddenly go up several levels. If you tried to do math for 17 hours a day over three weeks, you’d still be spending fewer hours th

How to make the most out of MOP I had a student at MOP ask me something equivalent to “how should I study while at MOP?” There is also a question about whether you should be studying much at MOP at all — you could also spend a lot of time making new friends, for example. That’s a value judgment that I think is better left to individuals and I won’t comment on it further in this post. For those of you that don’t know, MOP is the three-week summer camp for the USA’s team to the IMO. At first I was going to just link my FAQ. But then I thought about it a bit more, and I was surprised to find that

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