High school preparation for US student looking at Oxbridge/Imperial

[mdpmdp]

Thanks for your insightful comments, Twoin18.

@Twoin18

You also have to be really good at hard exams, because that is almost all of your grade (at Cambridge the whole year came down to four 3 hour exams over 2 days).

He definitely prefers classes that are highly test-grade based right now, although to that extreme…it’s probably hard to guess. But stylistically he liked the 2019 MAT questions (excluding the multiple-choice Q1), which might bode well for him?

@Twoin18

Don’t worry too much about AP stats, take MVC once you’ve done Calc BC. If you get to Linear Algebra then you’ll be ahead (although everyone does the same set of compulsory courses in the first year, and it is very heavily proof based from day one).

After BC Calc his sophomore year, he’ll take Calc 3 and Linear Algebra his junior year at his high school, and then probably Diff Eq and Probability Theory through UIUC his senior year. Likely Discrete Math at a local college at some point, too.

He’d be thrilled to take even more math and do a schedule like you had to do — “in school I spent two years doing 3+ hours of maths per day for A levels” — but we’re running out of possible classes for him to take. Plus it’d get hard to fit more in and also take a schedule that also looks balanced enough for US universities. I guess that’s why most Americans go to American colleges…

@Twoin18

The thing that will impress the most is getting beyond AIME: IMO qualification is essentially an automatic admit (see the article in here: https://share.trin.cam.ac.uk/sites/public/Alumni/The_Fountain_Issue_19.pdf) and AMO qualification would be a really big boost. Other math competitions and math circles would be helpful too.

He’s not IMO quality, I’m afraid. IOI (the CS equivalent) he would at least have a chance at, but it’s still awfully unlikely. He does have a decent shot at USAMO/USAJMO, I think.