HMNT

This space reserved for a post on hmnt, from the activities fair in august to the contest yesterday. It's worthwhile to note that in some sense, this is an anniversary, since this blog opened with a post on HMMT last year. Time passes quickly on long and short scales. In other news, goddamn orgo test tomm >_>

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Twas a junking August day, in the year 2009. All the freshmen were flooding the gates of the athletic center on their way to the activities fair. I got in and did the most obvious thing: got a free bag and started loading it with the freebies from all the clubs (anecdotally, most of the freebies I still have hidden in various nooks and crannies in my room). However, I was also aware of which clubs I would definitely take up, which I would definitely avoid (top of this list, anyone? =P), and which ones I might consider as the year went by. And so it happened that Jessica and I reached the non-descript booth next to the Undergraduate Math Association table. The booth was manned by Jacob and other people, and was devoted, as you will undoubtedly be shocked to hear, to promoting HMMT and getting people on the mailing list. In the course of the conversation with Jacob, he asked, "Would you guys be interested in organizing the problem writing for HMNT" or something along those lines.

Perhaps HMNT needs a brief introduction. HMNT, or the Harvard-MIT November Tournament, is HMMT for local Boston school kids. These kids have had little to no experience with math contests, and so this sets the dynamic of HMNT apart from HMMT in a couple of significant ways.

In any case, caught up in the euphoria of being silly frosh and our gradeless state of Pass/No Record, we said that sure, we could do that. Then we moved on through the rest of the fair and went back to Baker.

A couple of days later, we get a somewhat official looking email from Jacob letting us know what exactly we had tentatively accepted. Apparently we were to be the "Problem Czars" for HMNT, and it was our job to actually get the contests written and populated with appropriate problems. Now, being somewhat lazy from second sem senior year and being fully aware of how long it takes to write problems (or get them written), I was wary of continuing, but Jessica insisted that we continue, and so we accepted the position.

Fast forward several weeks of problem sessions. Due to Jacob and Shaunak's checking up on us, we had made sure to keep good track of the problems we had been received from these sessions that could potentially be used for HMNT. Coming into mid-October, we announced that we had enough problems to put together the rounds. This was good, since if we had waited any later, apparently things would have been not so great. We spend a stressful weekend texing up problems, editing mistakes we notice, and putting together what we think is an acceptable contest.

We release the four rounds for proofreading, and within two days we get a response: the problems suck, no joke. Not all of them, sure, but there are way too many problems that are either too hard or too easy, most of them aren't "interesting" (at this point, we really had no idea what that meant), and pretty much all the ones that work need to be revised in one way or another. This was fairly disappointing, though I will admit I had suspected that our problems were not so great >_>. Thus began the massive overhaul phase of this event. Jacob and Shaunak initially took over writing the Guts Round, leaving us the General, Theme, and Team Rounds. However, due to our general inability to recognize/write good problems fast enough, we were eventually left with full responsibility only for the Team Round. We finished this and helped out as much as we could with the other rounds. This whole spectacle took us around 3 weeks of hardcore work and, for me at least, staying up till 4:30 every morning.

Finally, everything is written and ready. We spend the last few days before the contest printing everything, collating stuff, and making sure that everything is all set up. Finally, it's the night before the contest. We've just wrapped up everything, and I'm running over to Baker at 10:30 so I can meet up with friends to watch Star Wars Ep 6. We finish this at around 1 in the morning, and I get to sleep.

The day of the contest arrives. I wake at 4, get ready, and am at Random at 5. We spend the next two or three hours moving random boxes with contests, free stuff, and oh so many bags of goddamn juice from Random to Lobbies 10 and 13, i.e. the place where you register and the place where you eat during HMMT respectively. After this, I'm told to go print out as many copies of guts solutions as I can. This is intermittent task and throughout the day I successfully retrieve maybe 100 copies total. At 9 I go to one of the two test rooms to proctor the General and Theme rounds. I read the little "Welcome to MIT...." speech and, despite my horrible timing skills, we manage to administer these tests alright. Then that's over, I watch the kids scramble to find their proctors for the team round, and then I head back out to go do more guts printing. At some point, Lily calls me and I go over to Stata to help with lunch. I eat lunch, do more printing, and then head over to the Guts Round. Despite not knowing the teams, this was decently fun. I decided to run rapidly up and down the aisles holding an answer sheet (sometimes after actually doing the problems) so as to scare the teams into thinking that some other team was doing absurdly well =P. Unfortunately, Jacob stopped giving me answer sheets after a while. The tournament wrapped up, and as all the kids left, I stood outside the guts auditorium and sold hmmt shirts (we almost sold out!). Then, following cleanup, we had a meeting and talked for a while, and then we all went back to our dorms. By this point it's around 10, so I get back to my room, talk to my neighbor and roommate for a while, plop down on the couch, and I'm out for the night.

Not quite the HMMT I remember, but as always, some things change and some things don't.

~jnub