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CSM Mathletes: Stephani Roark, Paul Wagner, Solomon Abiola, |
Twenty questions times two equals forty answers that require critical thinking skills and a fast pencil. Just forty questions and any student at the College of Southern Maryland can compete against other “mathletes” from two-year colleges in a competition of numbers, equations and solutions where one plus one always equals two.
As part of a national competition held by the American Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges, 70 students from CSM put pencils to paper to compete against students from community colleges across the nation and to win one of five slots on the CSM Math League.
According to professor and CSM Math League advisor Sue Strickland, “The competition consists of two 20-question exams (one administered in the fall and one in the spring semester) which challenge the participants to solve problems using their critical-thinking skills. The top five individual scores are combined and the total is submitted as a team score. Results are compiled at both a regional and a national level.”
In the first round of competition this year, the CSM Math League placed first in the state of Maryland and second in the highly competitive Mid-Atlantic region made up of 15 participating colleges in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia.
Nationally, the CSM Math League ranked 21st out of 181 participating schools with CSM student Tyler Myerberg ranking first for individual scorers in the Mid-Atlantic Region. “I was surprised to find out I had the highest score,” said Myerberg, who is dually enrolled at CSM and Leonardtown High School and is the president of his high school’s chapter of the National Honor Society. “I’ve always done well in math but I think it helped that I wasn’t stressed about taking the test. When you are relaxed, you tend to do better,” Myerberg said with a smile.
Myerberg, who supplements his classes at Leonardtown High School with English and math courses at CSM, has already been accepted into the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His decision to go into business was, “an epiphany…I always thought I would end up in science but I felt limited by the number of jobs I could apply it to whereas a business degree can be applied to so many different careers.”
Myerberg encourages other students to pursue the CSM Math League. “You don’t know how well you can do until you give it a shot. I used to dread word problems but now that I have more experience with them I can look past the words and almost see the numbers laying themselves out into equations.”
“Calculus is my favorite form of math,” said fellow CSM Math League team member Stephani Roark, as she describes how she got involved in the Math League. “I think I like calculus because you get to make sense out of a seemingly unsolvable problem.” Roark, who participated in a math team as part of the Mathcounts program at Margaret Brent Middle School, had the sixth highest individual score for the Mid-Atlantic region. Teammate, Solomon Abiola, ranked fourteenth giving the CSM Math League three of the top twenty Mid-Atlantic region individual scorers. Roark, who says she reads te