Competing in math taught me how to think. I often tell people that if I had not participated in math competitions since the third grade, I would lack most of my current mental capabilities. Today, due to my high school’s lack of an adequately funded and coached math team, I consider myself primarily a debater, but before high school, “mathlete” was my identity. Competitive math gave me some of my best friends and most influential role models, as well as numerous trophies to display on my bookshelf. However, my most valuable acquisition was invisible, and one I did not appreciate until later: an ability to use logic to solve problems.

Math competitions teach, but they don’t give answers. They train you to deduce them yourself. Competitive success depends upon a profound understanding of how to manipulate mathematical concepts to produce solutions. You must decipher problems, separate distractions from relevant information, and invent tricks that fill in missing pieces of puzzles. You tackle tens of problems testing hundreds of different concepts whose linkages you race to exploit. In competition, math is not divided into geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. There is only logic, which can be applied to planes, variables, triangles, or curves. If you understand the logic of trigonometry, you can modify it at will and apply it to calculus. If you can’t, you lose. Competitions train you to perceive the ways in which principles of mathematical reasoning connect numerous real-world situations. They teach you that “thinking like a mathematician” means searching for deeper truths behind information to discover its broader implications.

Competition math propelled my academic success by teaching skills that were conspicuously absent from my high school classes. Math classes in a large public high school prioritize efficiency over depth, sidelining critical thinking for speed. Rather than train me to devise my own solutions to problems, school math tells me to plug numbers into a memorized formula to produce an answer without ever questioning its logic. Why create new ways to solve problems when you can ace tests by following prescribed procedures? As a result, math classes, which should supposedly teach the logic and problem-solving skills crucial to every other academic discipline, instead leave students lacking the depth required to solve problems to which their memorized procedures do not apply.

Had I not learned creativity and critical thinking from competition math, I would not have achieved much of my academic success. My debate skill relies on my ability to strategize and cleverly exploit opponents’ logical errors. I learned Spanish grammar by envisioning nouns and verbs as components of an equation that fit together in a particular way to produce meaning. My chemistry and physics classes required little effort once I understood the logical behavior of molecules and waves; the formulas in my textbook were simply written representations of those rational conclusions and could be reinvented at will. The realization that my studies in every subject simply required different applications of the same mathematical problem-solving principles I had learned in the third grade empowered me to maximize my education.

Competition math has changed the way I learn. It has succeeded where school has often failed: in teaching me to seek deeper connections behind concepts and pursue knowledge beyond the realm of mechanical fact memorization. Competitions revealed to me that although “critical thinking” is a common catchphrase on the lips of politicians who claim to improve schooling, it is meaningless absent an educational system that prioritizes depth, logic, and inquiry. To be authentic, learning cannot be superficial. Blindly following a script does not require thought or promote intellectual growth. Instead, competition math empowered me to write the script myself.