The Math Outreach Project

Leon Du, 7/26/2026

Interviews

Today, we conducted our first interview in the 2026-27 interviewing season! Sign up for interviews here. Interviews will take around an hour total from start to finish. Place your name within a few of the green boxes — green means that at least 2 interviewers are open for the time slot.

How will interviews go?

To begin with, your interviewers will introduce themselves as well as the project. Your interviewer will be current or past head coaches that have had multiple years of experience teaching competition math. The interview will happen on Zoom, although since Zoom meetings are limited in time, be prepared to rejoin after the room closes.

The first section of the interview consists of 10-20 minutes of general interview questions. These interview questions will demonstrate your soft skills and your teaching skills, as well as allowing us to get to know you.

After the interview questions, we will begin with the practical section. The practical section consists of 8 problems divided into 4 sets (algebra, geometry, number theory, and combinatorics). Each set will have 1 easy problem and 2 hard problems, of which you will choose one to do. You will have 2.5 minutes to prepare a solution to the easy problem and up to 5 minutes to prepare one for the hard problem.

After you finish your solution, you will “teach” your interviewers the solutions you have developed as if they were middle school students that you were coaching. Your interviewers will grade you based on how well you address the central concepts to each problem, how clearly and concisely you explain the concepts, and your overall solution.

Keep in mind that you’re coaching middle schoolers who may not know as many theorems or lemmas as you! It’s not necessary to be able to solve every single problem, but what is truly important is that you’re able to try your hardest!

How can I prepare?

For the interview section, just be yourself! We aren’t looking for any specific “right” answers and we just want to be able to get to know you as a person.

For the practical section, you can do practice problems online at websites such as Alcumus or looking through past competition archives available on AOPS. The easy problems will typically be MATHCOUNTS chapter round difficulty, while hard problems will stay in the AMC 10 P10-15 and MATHCOUNTS state target round range.

We look forward to seeing you! Good luck to everyone!