Isabelle Ning: EGMO 2025 Report

Ever since last April, when the idea of NZ sending an EGMO team was told to us, I have been hoping to go to EGMO, and this is a dream come true! I was lucky enough to represent New Zealand for the 14th EGMO held in Pristina, Kosovo, as part of the first team that New Zealand has ever sent.

Not so serious pre-EGMO stuff:

Pre-EGMO training was quite fun, and it consisted of many exams, which were actually helpful. I’m not sure if these exams strengthened or hindered my confidence but either way, I considered them as useful practice for EGMO since we barely get any opportunities to sit a math olympiad exam. I was especially proud about APMO, more about that later. Meanwhile…

Turbo the snail:
This is a familiar (and hated) character in olympiad mathematics, after its debut in last year’s IMO P5 which trolled many. However, Turbo the snail has appeared not just once. Turbo showed up in 2017 and 2023’s EGMO too! Since combinatorics problems, basically being the only type of previous EGMO problems that I could solve, I secretly was hoping for Turbo to be a more frequent visitor. Anyways because of this, Turbo the snail is now like a religion that we all pray to before our exams. WE ALL LOVE TURBO! Sophie and I even bought a snail plush as our mascot to represent Turbo for good luck. However, this did not change her opinion on combinatorics (personally I think combinatorics is goated).

Back to APMO: This exam is usually a notoriously hard one, consisting of 5 problems throughout the span of 4 hours. I entered this exam with just one goal: to not get 0. Luckily, my prayers were answered by Turbo the snail. I named a function t(x,y) after turbo, and proceeded to solve the problem (I think???). I was hoping that Turbo is this nice to me during EGMO too.

The trip (8th and 9th of April):

After a long, kind of eventful 30-hour trip, we finally arrived at Prishtina. Some of the interesting things included:

• Naming our New Zealand EGMO team kiwi mascot. Names ranged from grass the dope kiwi, to finally settling on Kauchy the Kiwi, named after the mathematician Cauchy. However, it is an algebra-heavy name, which is not very dope.
• Bashing on a complex, cartesian, and airplane along with some ice cream. I proceeded to play un-tic-tac-toe with Bella, and that ended up being the only maths we did on the entire trip.
• My mascot, Turbelle the snail, got slightly crushed in security. Additionally, the security officers in the Istanbul airport were particularly interested in Kauchy the Kiwi.
• Sophie got stopped by almost every single officer because of either her two compasses in her carry-on bag or her different passport to all of us.

After we finally arrived, we ate our first real meal in Europe. We found Kosovian food extremely tasty, and we kept on saying ‘thank you’ in Albanian rather unsuccessfully… (for those of you who are wondering, it is faleminderit). Additionally, I discovered my love for board games, like basically everyone else in EGMO.

First full day in Kosovo (10th of April):

We woke up to the thought of doing another 4.5-hour mock (our first one was done in New Zealand), which I felt a bit better about since there was a combi. After a very tasty breakfast, we sat our mock, which we learnt very interesting things like there were only 5 cards we could raise to communicate, and to not raise the ‘help’ card unless we were in immediate danger. I did decent in this mock, receiving 1/7/0 (combi for the win) and combined with my 1/0/0 from the first day, I managed to get 9 points in total, receiving a bronze medal for 2014. I also got a taste of how difficult a marker's job was, as we got handed the job of first coming up with the mark scheme and then actually marking the scripts. I think the main takeaway from this mock was to try small, extreme, and special cases, since that was the reason why I didn’t get 0 marks, but also the reason why I didn’t get 15. Another thing I learnt was that my name is NZL 3 now. I also learnt that New Zealand people are very good at driving, since we almost got run over by quite a few Kosovians.

Arrival day (11th of April):

This was the day that we were extremely looking forward to, especially the free EGMO merch! It didn’t disappoint when we received possibly the most high-tech water bottles I have laid my eyes upon (it told us the temperature of the water), but it did leak some funny green liquid in Kyla’s one. It was also a very nice socialising day, where we got to meet and play many games with the Kyrgyzstan team and continued to explore the city. During our city exploration, we saw a random snail on the side of the street, where we strongly believed it would be related to Turbo and prayed to it for 1 minute. We got some weird looks, but it was hopefully worth it.

Opening ceremony day (12th of April):

It was so nice finally being able to meet all of the contestants for the first time! We talked to various countries, as well as giving away almost all of the New Zealand souvenirs in the first half hour. While practicing my broken French and slightly less broken Spanish with the French and Mexican teams respectively, we made many friends and also got a lot of souvenirs from the other teams. Notably, I got koala-ed by the Aussies 3 times, giving me 3 free koala keychains :D. Overall, it was a very nice day to socialise, since we were trying to forget that the exams would be the day after.

Day 1 exam (13th of April)

This day started with a breakfast with a tense atmosphere, and the cheery music not helping much. Once we got to the exam hall, we had an hour and a half of a ‘mandatory grass touching session’, which was basically the organisers not letting us in. After we finally got in, it was hard to recognise what was once a lively opening ceremony site had now become endless rows of exam desks. Once we started, my first thought was: oh no, no combi (it was N, A, G)??? And then I started struggling to understand Q2, so I did Q1 instead. The answer was quite trivial after trying some small cases, but it took me 3 hours to prove why the other answers didn’t work. During that time, a toilet incident occurred. Basically, I raised up the ‘toilet’ card, indicating that I needed to go to the bathroom, but one of the guides told me to wait. I then proceeded to wait 1 hour before I actually went to the bathroom since the queue was so long, during which I was not focused because I wanted to go to the bathroom really badly. I found the proof immediately after my toilet break, which consisted of considering p-1 and p+2 (where p is the largest divisor of N that is not a multiple of 3), and coming to a contradiction. The p+1 and p-2 case was basically the same as the other case, so I WLOGed it as I was running low on time, but it almost cost me a mark. Luckily, thanks to Josie and Brena, I was still able to get 7. After I finally understood Q2, I found a useful construction, but I couldn’t really prove it at all, although I was still happy that I understood the question since sequences look very scary to me. For Q3, I got as far as drawing the diagram (which was annoying to draw), and saying that 2 lines were parallel. Going out of the exam hall was also a hassle, where we were told to go out ‘one by one’ (or ‘një nga një’, which I had learned from the shouting guides). Honestly, I was very happy with how I did on day 1 as it guaranteed me a non-zero score :)

Funnily enough, later that day, I got gaslighted by the swiss.mo instagram meme page, along with a few guides, that Q2 was a combi question. I got kind of sad since that meant that there would probably be no combi for day 2, and Q2 was not a real combi. Luckily, it turned out to be an algebra problem. Despite the gaslighting from that page, it still had very cool memes, becoming one of my favourite instagram pages.

For dinner, we went to a fancy place with all the contestants from each country, which was fun but fell slightly short of distracting us from the exam the following day. Secretly, I was still hoping for a combi question, and that I would solve the Q4 geo.

Ultimately, I ended up on 7/1/0, thanks to Josie and Brena’s negotiation skills to fight for my marks.

Day 2 exam (14th of April)

After a bunch of estimation about what the questions would be, we eventually just gave up and tried to not think about it. The situation in the exam hall was much better, with short toilet queues, large screens displaying our time, and calmer guides. There were also problems yesterday with not allowing tissues into the exam hall, so we could request tissues with the ‘help’ sign. As SVK3 (sitting in front of me) put it, ‘the sign that was made for someone that is dying is now used to request tissues.’

When I opened my folder and saw the questions, I almost screamed. I saw Turbo the snail! However, I got a bit confused about what ‘over all’ meant, so I attempted Q4 first. It was G,C,A, which was basically what I estimated. It turns out that I didn’t learn from day 1, and also attempted Q4 for 3 hours. I was finally saved by a cyclic quad and wrapping up my proof with power of a point to prove two triangles were similar (I think this is the first time I’ve successfully used this before). However, my writeup was sloppy, since I didn’t want to spend that much time writing up my 3 hours' worth of angle chasing, and I skipped a few steps. Thanks again to Josie and Brena for saving me though. For Q5, I’m supposed to be a combi main, so I was very excited about this question. However, I tried to solve it in a graph theory way, which was not a big brain move (I’m only good at game theory, not graph theory). I conjectured the right answer, but had unproved lemmas and the proof for anything greater than n^2/4 was also sloppy (trying to gaslight the markers into believing me)… Turns out, there was this weird A1 mark which caused a lot of controversy between the leaders, and you had to get A1 otherwise it would be hard to get any more than 1 mark, which was what I got.

Q6 was just weird, I tried the n=2 case and got stuck on n=3. I thought I found a construction, but I conjectured like 5 different answers. Turns out my construction was correct, and I could’ve gotten 2 marks for it, but I wrote ‘smaller numbers’ instead of 1/2025 since I thought I would get 0. Because of that, I became one of the 3 contestants who got 1 point for the question (0 and 2 were much more common scores). Overall, I think I also did decently on day 2, but we promised not to talk or think about it anymore, as it would just cause unnecessary stress. On a side note, I wrote down each section of this log on the day or the day after, so all of the Turbo mentions were written before the exam, which was some sort of pro foreshadowing. I guess all the praying to Turbo did work after all (but I didn’t do that good on that question…)

However, we were all just glad that the exams were over and proceeded to enjoy the Jane Street hub. I made a bracelet saying NZL 3, but my head hurt from staring at the geo problem for too long, so I didn’t attempt any of the puzzles in the hub. I did the next logical thing, which was to play chess (I couldn’t resist) against random guides, which hurt my head even more. Beneath all of this, I was just praying to Turbo that I was going to medal. Ultimately, I got 7/1/,1 which was extremely surprising since I expected less than 7 for the geo (my angle chasing was hard to follow), and definitely nothing for question 6. Turns out, I got the construction in my mere 3 pages of scribble. I could not believe I got a mark for an algebra Q6, since algebra is my worst area.

Excursion to Prizren (15th of April)

I woke up feeling very drained, with a sore throat, which was probably a side effect of all the math I did in the previous few days. The fact that I probably walked more steps than during the whole of April didn’t really help, but at least the experience was worth it. The bus ride was interesting, where I found out that Kosovian/Albanian music actually sounded quite good. Once we got there, it was just a blur of walking, climbing, and more walking. I also talked to the Peru team to practice a bit more of my kind of broken Spanish, and also socialised with other teams to play mao. The scenery and experience were all worth it, but I was constantly thinking about what my score would be. On the bus ride back, I saw my score was 17, which is a bronze medal! The highest bronze medal cutoff ever was 16, so it meant that I was most likely going to get a medal. I was too tired to do too much though…

We also saw that the snail outside our hotel was gone; it had been there since the first day we were there, and it also survived a fire after the first day of the exams. I guess after appearing on the exam papers, his/her/their/its job was done. We also saw a crushed snail that was probably killed by one of the other teams, probably trying to express their anger about everything the snail has done.

Closing ceremony day (16th of April)

By the time we had woken up, the medal cutoffs still weren’t up, since the marking of Q5 took basically the entire night. While the leaders and coordinators were finalising the cutoffs, we went to the Prishtina mall, the biggest mall in Eastern Europe. Sophie and Bella insisted we go to an escape room first, but all the non-scary ones had been taken, so we ended up going to a scary one. Turns out it was 15+, and neither of them was 15. It didn’t stop them from being sacrificed in the room though, since they were the ones who insisted that we go. After the receptionists said that there were no jump scares in the room, and being jumpscared 10 minutes later, I decided to just leave the escape room since I already had a headache and did not want to be stuck being scared for an hour. The go-karting was very fun though. It was the first time I had driven anything that was not a bumper car, and I managed to not bump into anything. When we were having lunch, the medal cutoffs were out, and I had gotten the first ever EGMO medal for New Zealand! Honestly, it had exceeded my expectations, and I was able to fully enjoy the rest of our time at the mall.

The closing ceremony and the after party were just speeches, followed by people on stage fighting over whose flag would be in front of whose, followed by loud music. Sophie joined me in having a headache, so we decided to not socialise with the other teams after the party.

Departure day (17th of April)

We visited the cathedral and played some Mao with the guides, and we were all sad about how quickly EGMO was over. We all had such a great time and didn’t want to go. After some painful goodbyes to our beloved guide Aria, we arrived at the airport, where we had some interesting conversations with the Chinese team, and Sophie continued to get stopped at every airport. The flights back were not so eventful, and the best part of the trip back to NZ was going home and sleeping on my own bed.

Questions

How has attending this event demonstrated greater knowledge of available career paths in science and technology?

The speech by Citadel and the promotion by Jane Street enlightened me on more possible job opportunities that involve mathematics, like data analysis and trading.

How has attending this event enthused or inspired you to pursue science and technology careers? Has attending this event changed about how you feel about science or technology?

Now that I know more possible careers, I think it has inspired me to be more open-minded about which career I undertake, but not so much how I feel about science or technology, since I have always had a passion for it.

How has attending this event and participating with like-minded students been of benefit to you?

Everyone at EGMO was so relatable and fun to talk to, giving me friends that I would likely see again and friendships that would last for a long time. I also got a chance to practice foreign languages with native speakers! They have also reminded me that there are so many pro people overseas, and that I still have quite a long way to go…

Now that you have had time to reflect about your experience, what have you learnt about yourself?

Firstly, I have learnt how bad my handwriting is at times, but I have also discovered that I liked math more than I expected. I’ve also learnt about some cool exam techniques, like how getting partials is not hard with the right technique, and to attempt every problem with an open mind.

What did you enjoy about your experience?

I enjoyed the whole EGMO trip, especially the mathing and all the new people I met.

Final words

First of all, thank you to Jane Street for sponsoring basically everything! From the math camps to EGMO, everything was basically covered by Jane Street. Thank you so much to my teammates Kyla, Bella, and Sophie for never failing to make me laugh, and always being there to talk to. You guys have made the trip so enjoyable! Additionally, thank you to our amazing guide Aria for showing us around the city and for your unwavering support. Finally, last but not least, thank you to Josie and Brena for taking us there and fighting for the marks we deserve! ALSO THANK YOU SO MUCH TURBO FOR ANSWERING MY PRAYERS (not the Q5 though)!