What ORMC is and why you may be interested in working for it.
ORMC, short for UCLA Olga Radko Endowed Math Circle, is a top-tier free Sunday math school for gifted children run by UCLA Department of Mathematics. ORMC teaches modern day math, mostly absent from the standard school curriculum, to children in grades K through 12. There are currently about 400 students and 80 instructors in the program. ORMC students routinely place high on national math competitions, such as AMC 8/10/12, AIME, USJMO, USAMO, BAMO, Math Kangaroo, etc. ORMC high school students occasionally produce publishable research and win state and national science fairs. In 2023, an ORMC student was named as one of the top 40 young scientists in the nation by Regeneron Science Talent Search, formerly Intel Science Fair, possibly the oldest and most prestigious national science competitions for high school students.
The following are the five reasons why you may be interested in working for ORMC:
1. You are likely to learn a lot of math you wouldn’t have learned otherwise in a low-stress environment. For example, here is a list of topics covered in a Summer 2023 Advanced 1 (early high school) class:
· Error-Correcting codes
· Combinatorics and Graph Theory
· Network Flow
· Size of Sets
· Definable Sets
· Pigeonhole Principle
· Deterministic Finite Automata
· Group Theory and Cryptography
The packets were designed for high school freshmen and sophomores, so it is not hard for a college student to learn the material to the point where they can teach it to said students.
2. Many ORMC students are extremely bright. Working with them is a lot of fun! For example, I once gave the following problem to a class of middle school students:
Find the value of Sqrt(12345678987654321) without a calculator. In a split second, one student said, “It’s obvious. Nine ones.”
There was a girl, then in the 6th grade, who invented integration solving a problem at the board, etc.
3. You will get a letter of recommendation from the Circle and a useful line in your CV/resume. For example, according to a PostDoc at UCLA Department of Mathematics and a deputy director of the Circle at the time, now a tenure-track professor at Rutgers University Department of Mathematics, it was his work for the Circle that helped him get the position. There were five candidates at the last stage of the selection process, all equally qualified with regard to research. It was the teaching and administrative experience at ORMC that made our candidate stand out. If you apply to graduate school, you also might apply for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program or other NSF grants–the ORMC is a great thing to write in your Broader Impacts section in this application!
4. You will meet some very bright like-minded UCLA students. For example, two recent ORMC lead instructors teamed up to start a company after graduating from UCLA with degrees in math and CS respectively.
5. We pay. Being a free Circle surviving on donations, we don’t pay much. The current rate for undergraduate assistant instructors is $18 per hour for both face-to-face and prep time. The hourly rate for undergraduate lead instructors is $27. Grad students are paid higher rates.
If interested, please contact me at
and CC to the deputy director of the Circle, Prof. Tom Gannon, at
Please include a copy of your UCLA transcript.