How a tip from a friend took Moazou to Burkina Faso's national mathematics camp
When a friend mentioned at the end of the school year that Burkina Faso's national mathematics olympiad was open to high school students, Moazou Tapsoba had roughly a month before the application closed. He had no coach, no preparation behind him and no particular reason to expect that he would get past the first stage. He applied regardless, and the month that followed eventually earned him a seat at the national mathematics camp in Ouagadougou.
The competition runs in two stages. Candidates apply online, and those who pass that round are invited to sit a written examination in person, where five problems have to be solved in three hours and only the twenty strongest candidates in the country are taken forward to the camp. Moazou spent the weeks before the online round working through problems on his own, night after night, without a study group to compare answers with or a teacher to mark his attempts.
“After a month of preparation every single night, I did the online application and I passed it.”
Moazou TapsobaFive problems, three hours
The written stage was the harder of the two, and it left little room for anything other than the mathematics itself. When the national ranking was published, Moazou had finished sixteenth, four places inside the cut, and the confirmation reached him by telephone one evening, telling him he had a place at the camp in Ouagadougou for the duration of the school holidays.
He attended every session of it. What he describes taking home is not a prize but a method, a way of approaching olympiad problems that his classroom had never covered, together with a group of students from across the country who were working through the same material at the same level.
“I learned tons of methods to resolve olympiad problems, made friends, and had a new experience in my life.”
Moazou TapsobaThe part worth copying
There is little in Moazou's route to Ouagadougou that another student could not repeat. He learned of a competition from one person, gave it a month of evenings and then sat the same examination as everyone else who had applied. Only the first of those steps depended on chance, and it is the step that decides most outcomes. Olympiads, camps and summer schools of this kind run in most countries and in most subjects, their application windows rarely stay open longer than a few weeks, and the students who never enter are usually the ones nobody told in time.
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