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I am a freshman in college.

Is there any advice for approaching undergraduate level math competitions despite a lack of extensive high school math competition experience? My participation in high school math competitions started to wane over the years, not reaching very far in the AMC and other regional competitions.

However, I was hoping to make more time for competitive math in college, but I feel (knowing I would not do so well in competitions such as the high school AMC, AIME, USAMO, etc.) that I would only get very lost just trying to look up past college competitions and making sense of the questions and answers. How should I approach catching up? Should I just start with these high school competitions, or is there another way? Any advice would help.

faelesterio
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Focus on your classes.

Create a list of organizations that you would consider competing for. Order list by importance; consider their weight on your future applications. Focus on the more important organizations. Determine what resources the organizations themselves offer for training. Obtain examples and problem sets exemplifying previous competitions of the same nature. Repeat for each competition under each organization.

In Response To The Comments:

(Q2) High Learning Curve: Consider what it's like to learn at a linear rate, where nothing you learn relates to the next thing you learn; making it impossible to combine the things to learn to learn more things. Certainly, you would like to be able to combine what you learn so you could learn faster. In a nonlinear, more curved upward way.

There is an idea in Mathematics of the richness of propositions. The richer an idea is the more ideas can be derived from it. Simply put, master the basics and as you progress, incorporate ideas you learn into a broader body of knowledge.

You will want to set a boundary on what it is you want to master. Anything else you learn will be incidental. For you, that is (Q1) the Putnam exam. You want to master everything in the Putnam exam. To make this simpler, break down the Putnam exam into the categories which you will be expected to perform well in. Begin mastery in all of those topics. This, again, becomes much more involved...

For how general your question was, that's how general my answer will have to be.

Diatche
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  • thanks for the answer; how would one approach something like the Putnam given said circumstances? How to compete and do well in this without getting lost by (what I would assume) a very high learning curve? – faelesterio Aug 27 '18 at 23:00
  • Edited in. This seems to be more of an educational inquisition than a mathematics one, to be sure. – Diatche Aug 28 '18 at 03:44