Current News and Upcoming Events
Magnet Team a Moody Mega Math Challenge Finalist
A team of five Magnet students, Alexander Bourzutschky, Alan Du, Tatyana Gubin, Lisha Ruan, and Audrey Shi, are among the six finalists for this years Moody's Mega Math Challenge. They earned a scholarship of $2,500 for their efforts in the competition,an applied mathematics event requiring students to write a paper on a real-world problem in a single day. This year's topic was on improving the was cities recycle.
North American Computational Linguistics Competition
Congratulations to the six Magnet students who qualified for the second round of testing in this year Program students qualified for the second round of testing in this year's North American Computational Linguistics Competition (NACLO). To qualify, the six, Daniel Amir, Alan Du, Daniela Ganelin, Michelle Noh, Victor Xu, and Sam Zbarsky, had to score in the top 200 in the country. Later testing will determine which four of these 200 students will compete for the U.S. at the 2013 International Computational Linguistics Olympiad, to be held July 22-27 in Manchester, U.K.
Intel Finalist Places Seventh
Congratulations to Senior Sam Zbarsky, who placed seventh in the prestigious Intel Science Search for 2013, the "Nobel Prize for high school science." Sam won a $25,000 scholarship. Sam's paper was entitled research is entitled “On Improved Bounds for Bounded Degree Spanning Trees for Points in Arbitrary Dimension” and was completed under the guidance of Dr. Samir Khuller of the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP), Department of Computer Science.
U.S. Physics Team Semifinalists
Thirteen Magnet students were named as semifinalist to the 2013 U.S. Physics Team. Congratulations to Alexander Bourzutschky, Saurav Das, Jason Hyun, Diwakaran Ilangovan, Thomas Loomis, Eric Lu, Bob Ma, Charles Pasternak, Jessica Shi, Michael Winer, Matthew Yu, Samuel Zbarsky, and Dennis Zhao. Finalists for the team will be selected later this spring.
First and Third at Local Programming Contests
At the VCU High School Programming Contest in early March, Blazers Ashutosh Nanda, Alan Du, Matthew Das Sarma, and Avikar Periwal took home first place. Ashutosh Nanda (captain), Alexander Bourzutschky, Matthew Das Sarma, and Alan Du also captured third place in the annual UMD Programming Contest in late February.
Top Awards in the 13th Annual Johns Hopkins Math Tournament
Blazers took home several awards in this years' Johns Hopkins Math Tournament, including Shaun Datta, Eric Neyman, and Victor Xu, who won first place in the Calculus, Algebra, and Probability and Statistics categories, respectively. Fellow Blair Magnet classmate Sachin Pandey earned second place in the Geometry category, and the Blair Magnet team comprised of Scott Wu, Daniel Yuan, Alex Zhang, and Richard Zhu took home second place in team competition.
Recognizing that education is an individual experience that depends on the unique talents and interests of each person, the mission of the Blair Magnet Program is to provide an environment in which each person's education is maximized by emphasizing the interrelationships among the disciplines, developing a repertoire of problem-solving techniques, and pursuing both independent and collaborative research projects
To realize the above mission, the staff nurtures the special talents of its academically able students by fostering individualism, independent thinking, and self-confidence by challenging those students through a unique, diversified curriculum. The environment, structure, and content promote the self-learner concept in which students participate in constructing their own knowledge base and learn problem-solving strategies that foster the multidisciplinary approach. The scope of their education extends beyond traditional classroom boundaries as students are asked to connect with a community that includes not only parents, mentors, other students, and staff but also a physical environment as diverse as our region.
