In both years the contest ran, I (Arup) awarded a cash prize of $250 to the winner from my own pocket. In the first year, the winner was Tanuj Badwal, a senior at the time from Winter Park High School. By the time the last contest was graded, Tanuj had already attended his last day of school. Thus, in order to get him his prize, I decided to go to his house and award it to him. His mother was so gracious, letting me into their house, made me a cup of tea and we chatted for over an hour. Tanuj was a creative problem solver and what made me most happy was that he wasn't from a rich family. He was genuinely excited about getting some cash and was planning to use it to help buy a laptop. One of his monthly submissions was 18 pages worth of work while the other one was 11 pages worth of work. What he did is precisely what I was hoping to promote: he thought hard about some interesting problems, took some wrong turns, but made some discoveries about the way, learning things he wouldn't have learned if he just attempted run of the mill problems from standard high school text books. Even though we only had five students total compete in that first year, I was excited that at least in the individuals who did compete, my problems were getting them to learn more mathematics.

In the second year the contest ran, participation went up to eight students. The winner, Kevin Spehar, a senior at the time from Olympia High School, truly showed mathematical creativity winning the contest with a score of 173 total points. The second place student only had 53 points. I was excited to meet Kevin and this time, he was still in school by the time we had finished our grading of the last round. When I was a high school student, we had an awards ceremony for seniors and many different organizations gave to give prizes to various students. I remember getting an Air Force award, which was given to me by a retired member of the Air Force. I enjoyed meeting that gentleman and I thought it would be neat to be able to go to an award ceremony for a school and present a check for $250 to the winner of the UCF-OMC. I decided to email the principal of Olympia High School at the time to ask him if I could attend their award ceremony to give him his check. I thought that it would be nice for others to see public recognition of a student who worked hard and achieved excellence in mathematics. The principal said that I could not come to an awards program to give the award. I then proceeded to ask when would be a good time for me to come to give him his award. I tried to explain how good Kevin was and that I felt this was an important achievement, much harder than getting an 800 on the SAT math, for example. It took multiple emails, but finally, the principal asked me to come in on a particular day at a particular time. I came at that time to the school, but when I went to the front office, I was told I couldn't speak with the student and that he'd be in testing for a while. I asked if I could see an administrator to talk about the award and was told no. In fact, I was forced to sit at the front office for over 90 minutes before I was allowed to give the award to Kevin. I was incensed that the top administrator of a school wouldn't consult his schedule or the school's schedule before telling me which time to come. Furthermore, because this person refused to meet with me, it was clear that he DID NOT CARE about excellence in mathematics at all. It upset me greatly that all I was trying to do was give an academic award to a student and the principal at the school could care less to take the time to properly arrange for me to come to the school, much less allow a platform where his peers could see a student being rewarded for academic excellence.

So, that was the last straw. I had put in an immense amount of time creating problems, writing solutions and grading student responses. (This was all volunteer work and because I was giving a cash prize, I was actually losing a small amount of money.) It was tough putting in that much time and seeing such little student participation because the amount of impact my time was having was very little. Then to see the general apathy towards academic excellence of the leader of a school of over 3000 students was absolutely disheartening. Basically, I was up against forces that were too strong - if all the powerful people in charge of academics don't care about excellence in mathematics, it would be extremely difficult for me to get lots of students to care about it. I know the environment is NOT like this all over the country. I have gotten to run the SI@UCF Competition Programming Camp since 2015, and since that time I've met students who are some of the top math students in the country. They tell me about extremely supportive schools and tons of mathematics competitions they attend. I have been encouraged to see that there are pockets of educators and administrators in this country that care about motivating the top students. For the most part, that doesn't seem to be a concern of the administrators in the Orlando area. As best as I can tell, they want to put all their effort forth for the lower and average achieving students. I've had similar occurrences since then. I approached the principal at Blankner Elementary to see if they could start MathCounts and while we had an email exchange, no actual action was taken. I asked a teacher at Dr. Phillips High School if they could get involved in a mathematics contest that could be hosted at the school and didn't require driving anywhere, just mailing off a couple forms for registration, and he just said "no." I haven't given up totally, but it's clear to me that most educators don't care about giving avenues for the very best students in the Orlando area opportunities to excel.

Thus, the combination of lack of student participation and apathy towards extracurricular math shown by area school administrators is why I decided to stop running the UCF Online Mathematics Contest.

Arup Guha