Student Essay Contest

Sponsored by AWM and Math for America

To increase awareness of the ongoing contributions to the mathematical sciences by women and to promote gender inclusivity, the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and Math for America co-sponsor an essay contest for biographies of contemporary mathematicians and statisticians in academic, industrial, and government careers. Each essay will be based primarily on an interview with a woman or an individual from any underrepresented gender identity in the mathematics community who is currently working in or retired from a mathematical sciences career. Participation is open to middle school, high school, and undergraduate students.

Submission Procedure

Submission Period. November 1 – February 1 through MathPrograms.org.

Submission Packet. A valid submission will contain the following information:

A biographical essay of approximately 500 – 1000 words in length, based primarily on an interview you conduct with a woman or an individual from an underrepresented gender identity in the mathematics community who is currently working in or retired from a mathematical career;
A short (approximately 100 words) biographical sketch of the student contestant. This biographical sketch can be written in the first person, and it should include the student’s name, grade level, school, and mathematical interests;
Information about the student:
- student’s name;
- address of student (or parent);
- phone number or email address of student (or parent);
Information about the subject of the biography:
- name;
- email address;
- phone number (optional).

How to Submit. Submissions for the 2027 contest will open on November 1, 2026. If you have any questions, please contact the AWM Essay Contest Organizer, Dr. Johanna Franklin (johanna.n.franklin@hofstra.edu).

Contest Rules

Categories. This essay contest is open to students in the following categories:

Grades 6 – 8
Grades 9 – 12
Undergraduate

At least one winning submission will be chosen from each category.

Judging Criteria. Your essay should be based primarily on an interview you conduct with an appropriate interview subject.

The submission must be in essay form, not just a transcript of your interview.
The essay should be approximately 500 to 1000 words in length.
Essays will be judged by a panel of mathematicians on content, grammar, presentation, and the presence of an authentic author’s voice.

Essay Subject. You may interview and write about any woman or individual from any underrepresented gender identity in the mathematics community who is currently working in or retired from a mathematical sciences career with a small number of exceptions (listed below). Here are some suggestions for finding someone to interview:

To find out about mathematical careers, you can look at the resources at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website or the SIAM website.
Try the websites for the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM), the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), Lathisms, Mathematically Gifted & Black (MGB), Indigenous Mathematicians, or Spectra.
Look for mathematicians who are active on social media.
Look up professors in mathematics at a local college or university (you can try looking up the school’s website and looking for the mathematics department; many departments list their faculty and their email addresses).
Consider other mathematical departments at colleges and universities, such as applied mathematics, computer science, statistics, physics, engineering, finance, etc.
Ask a nearby math teacher.

A few people are not eligible as essay subjects. They are:

subjects of essays that have won a Grand Prize, First Place, or Honorable Mention in the past three contests,
the President, President-Elect, Past President, and Executive Director of the AWM, and
current AWM Essay Contest Committee members.

A complete list of ineligible interviewees can be found here.

Permitted Assistance.

Before the interview:
Ask a peer, a family member, or a teacher for feedback on your topics and questions for the interview, or ideas about how to organize the interview. Brainstorming with other people is great!

While writing the essay:

It’s OK to use spell checks and grammar checks and ask a peer, family member, or teacher to read it for clarity.
We don’t want you to get any other help from a human.
We also don’t want you to get any other help from technology, especially generative AI. We want your own author’s voice to shine through.

Suggested Interview Questions. The following questions are suggestions for what to ask your interviewee during the interview:

What motivated your interviewee to pursue a career in the mathematical sciences?
What is your interviewee’s educational, family, or cultural background?
What kind of work does your interviewee do?
Does your interviewee have any advice to students who are interested in pursuing a career in the mathematical sciences?
What are your interviewee’s hobbies?

These questions are just starting points! Use them as a guide, but ask other questions based on your interests or what you know about your interviewee’s interests and experiences, too. You should also follow up with more questions based on your interviewee’s responses to make this more of a conversation. Speaking in person, over the phone, or in a videoconference instead of e-mailing will make it easier for you two to respond to each other.

All submissions become the property of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

FAQs

I’m not female. Can I still enter the contest?
Absolutely! The contest is open to all students in these grade categories. The only gender restriction is that the person interviewed must be a woman or an individual from any underrepresented gender identity in the mathematics community.

Can homeschooled students participate?
Yes.

I’m not a US citizen/I don’t live or attend school in the US. Can I still participate?
Yes.

Can my friend and I write an essay together and submit it?
No, each essay must be written and submitted by a single person.

Can I interview a relative?
Yes.

Can I interview a graduate student?
Most of the time, graduate students won’t fit the contest criteria: their mathematical careers haven’t really started yet! However, if a graduate student worked in a mathematical career before starting their graduate program, then it’s reasonable to interview them and focus your essay on that.

Can I include information I find elsewhere about my interviewee?
You can read about them before you interview them and use that information to decide which questions to ask, but your essay must be based on the interview you conduct yourself.

How do I find someone to interview?
If you know someone appropriate already, you can tell them about the contest and ask them to do an interview with you. If you don’t already know someone, you can ask your family or your friends’ family members if they know anyone, or you can look at nearby businesses (insurance companies, engineering firms, software companies, research organizations, government labs, etc.) and schools, possibly checking online, and see if there are any women or people from an underrepresented gender identity in the mathematics community who use math heavily in their jobs and would be willing to be interviewed for the contest.

How can I conduct my interview as thoughtfully as possible?
First of all, be sure to thank your interviewee! Before you begin, you could send any questions you’ve thought of in advance so they have a chance to think about their answers, and if you want to record the interview, you should ask permission in advance as well. At the end of the interview, you should ask if they’d like anything to be “off the record.” Finally, once you’ve written your essay, you could offer your interviewee the chance to read it before you submit it.

Is it okay to get outside help with my essay?
Please look at the Contest Rules for more detail, but when you write the essay, you should write it with minimal assistance. We want to hear your voice, not someone else’s! In particular, we don’t want you to use generative AI.

Is this a scholarship?
No, it is a contest. There is a monetary award, but it doesn’t have to be used for schooling.

How many winners are there?
There is one First Place Winner in each category (Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, and Undergraduate) and a Grand Prize Winner chosen from among those three First Place Winners. There are also typically 0-3 Honorable Mentions in each category.

What are the prizes?
The winners (including Honorable Mentions) receive a monetary prize, a membership in the Association for Women in Mathematics, and a certificate, and their names and affiliations are published in the AWM Newsletter. In addition, all of the essays are published online, and the Grand Prize winner‘s essay is published in the AWM Newsletter.

How do I submit my essay?
You’ll be able to submit it online when the contest opens in early November. We’ll post the link here then.

Can I send an email with my essay as an attachment?
No, there is a risk that it would get lost.

Do I need to give my home address and phone number?
You can use your school’s address. What is important is that we have a way to contact you (typically in March) if you win.

Can I enter more than one essay in the same year?
No, each student should only submit one essay. If a student does enter more than once, typically because there was a mistake in the first entry, the most recent entry is used.

Why do I need to give my interviewee’s e-mail address or phone number?
There are two reasons. First, we contact all of the interviewees as soon as the judging begins and thank them for taking the time to be interviewed. Second, if your essay wins a prize, we will need to contact your interviewee and confirm that they feel the essay is accurate before we finalize the contest results.

If I won a prize, can I still enter the contest again?
Yes, but you should interview someone else and then write a new essay.

For Interviewees

First of all, thank you for considering being interviewed for the AWM/MfA Essay Contest! Here’s what you can expect as an interviewee:

A student will contact you and ask to interview you. Perhaps you knew them already, perhaps a mutual acquaintance connected you, or perhaps they got in touch with you out of the blue. The interview arrangements are made entirely between you and the student: depending on your preferences and availability, you could meet in person, speak on the phone, or videochat. (We encourage the student to speak with you rather than relying on e-mail to make the interview more of a two-way conversation.) It’s all right to say that you aren’t comfortable with your interview being recorded, and it’s all right to ask the student to consider part of the interview “off the record” afterwards if you find you’ve told a story you’d rather not have published online.

The essay must be the student’s own work—you shouldn’t be involved in the writing at all! We also encourage the students to show their essays to their interviewees upon request before submission, so if you would like to read the resulting essay, please feel free to ask them for a copy. However, please keep any corrections you make at the level of fixing basic factual errors (such as “I went to Miami University, not the University of Miami”) or asking the student to remove material that you’d be uncomfortable having published. We want to read the student’s writing, not yours.

We’ll e-mail you within a day or so after the contest deadline (February 1) to let you know we’ve received an essay about you. Judging will begin a few days after that, and we expect to finish the judging by the middle of March. At that point, if the essay about you wins a prize, we’ll contact you so you can read the essay and check it for accuracy before it’s published on the AWM website (and, in the case of the Grand Prize winner, in the AWM Newsletter as well). The winning essays will be posted on the AWM website in April.

If you have any questions about the interview process or the contest in general, please feel free to contact the Chair of the AWM Essay Contest Committee, Dr. Johanna Franklin, at johanna.n.franklin@hofstra.edu.

For Teachers

I want to make this a class project. Do you have any suggestions?
This would be wonderful! Sometimes teachers even help their students produce a website or magazine of their submissions–though we ask that you not publish their work online until the contest is complete so the judging can be anonymous.

We encourage you to help your students think of potential questions for their interviewees and to think about how you can help all your students find someone to interview. We suggest that you look locally for interview subjects, perhaps at local businesses, colleges, or universities. Perhaps a guidance counselor could help your students make connections, too!

Can I help my students submit their essays?
Absolutely. Each of them will need their own account on mathprograms.org with a separate email address, but you can help with the submission process.

I teach middle school, and I’m encouraging my students to do this. Do they need to use their home address and phone number, or can they use the school’s address and my phone number?
Your students can use your school’s address and your phone number as their teacher: these are used to contact winners. Typically the first contact is through email and/or phone, and the mailing address is used later.

Contest Winners and Essays

Want to be in the loop?

If you’d like us to send you a couple reminders about the essay contest in the fall, a notification that judging is beginning in February, and then an announcement of the winners in the spring, please fill out the form at this link.

Opt in here!

Questions? Call the AWM Administrative Specialist at 401-455-4042 or email awm@awm-math.org.