Independent HiMCM preparation coaching
LEARN TO
DEFEND THE MODEL.
Structured instruction and feedback for students who want a clearer preparation process. Coaching is educational support; students retain authorship and responsibility for all contest work.
Diagnostic
Review current experience, tools, English writing, schedule, and team roles to identify the smallest useful next step.
Concept lessons
Build modeling judgment through examples, comparisons, and short exercises rather than a formula catalogue.
Milestones
Use scoped deliverables for framing, data, model specification, implementation, tests, and writing.
Feedback
Receive questions and revision priorities that help students locate unsupported claims or weak links.
Simulation
Practice an end-to-end historical case under time constraints with role handoffs and a PDF deadline.
Debrief
Convert observed bottlenecks into a personalized checklist and preparation schedule.
Results reported by Hanlin International Education
THE TRACK
RECORD.
Hanlin International Education, the operator of this site, has coached HiMCM teams since 2016. Across those seasons its students have earned 7 Outstanding awards, 35+ Finalist awards, and 30+ Meritorious awards in HiMCM, including one team that received the NCTM Award in 2022 – the recognition COMAP and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics present to just two HiMCM Outstanding teams each year. Recent seasons, as reported by the operator:
| Season | Outstanding | Finalist | Meritorious | Honorable Mention |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 6 |
| 2024 | – | 3 | 6 | 10 |
| 2023 | – | 5 | 6 | 12 |
| 2022 | 1 (+ NCTM Award) | 6 | 5 | 11 |
| 2021 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 11 |
| 2020 | 1 | 3 | 6 | 13 |
Results are reported by Hanlin International Education from its own coaching records. Past results describe past teams; they are not a promise or prediction of any future award.
Who teaches
THE COACHING
TEAM.
Coach An
BS in Mathematics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (highest honors); PhD in Mathematics, Johns Hopkins University (full scholarship, Owen fellowship). Senior data scientist at a major US financial group, with six years of US university teaching experience and a former mentorship role in JHU’s Directed Reading Program.
Coach Zhang
BSc in Mathematics, University College London; MSc in Financial Modelling and Optimization, University of Edinburgh. Co-author of Hanlin’s modeling lecture notes; previously in data analysis and consulting roles at Tencent and an international consultancy. Co-coached teams to Finalist, Meritorious, and Honorable Mention awards in 2023.
Coach Zhou
MSc in Data Analytics, University of Southern California; double major in Actuarial Science and Statistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Coached two HiMCM Meritorious teams in 2024 and award-winning IMMC teams in 2025; teaches fully in English.
How the program is structured. The pre-contest course runs about 28 hours: a modeling overview with a timed mini-simulation, Python foundations and applied programming, evaluation and multi-criteria decision models, a four-part optimization sequence (linear, integer, and nonlinear programming), prediction models, and paper structure with LaTeX practice – each drill mapped to COMAP’s official solution guidelines. Teaching materials are Hanlin’s own lecture notes, updated every season and organized into eleven modules from methodology to worked exercises.
Grounded in the official rules
WHEN COACHING
IS ALLOWED.
COMAP explicitly encourages advisors and faculty to coach and prepare students before the start of the contest, and publishes resources for exactly that: prior years’ problems, mathmodels.org, the Director’s Article and Judges’ Commentary, and the official Tips article. Preparation coaching operates in this pre-contest space.
Once the contest window opens, the official rules take over: teams may not use any persons other than their own team members to discuss or obtain ideas – including advisors, teachers, other students, and outside experts or professionals. All coaching therefore stops at the contest window. We do not communicate with students about the live problem during the contest period.
What COMAP’s judges reward. Per the official instructions, judges are primarily interested in a team’s thought processes, analysis of the problem, modeling approaches, and mathematical methods. Solutions are judged as varying degrees of successful, and partial solutions are acceptable. Our milestones map to the official solution guidelines: restate the problem, expose variables and assumptions, justify the model, design and test it, discuss strengths and weaknesses, keep lengthy derivations in appendices, report results explicitly, and document every source.
SCOPE
BOUNDARY.
Appropriate support includes teaching general methods, reviewing practice work, questioning assumptions, demonstrating tools on separate examples, and helping a team improve project organization.
- No ghostwriting or submission on a student’s behalf.
- No undisclosed outside contribution to contest work.
- No copying from historical papers or solution banks.
- No fabricated data, references, credentials, or results.
- No promise of a particular award or admissions outcome.
Before requesting support
BRING A
REAL QUESTION.
Coaching is provided by Hanlin International Education (翰林国际教育), the operator of this site – Tel 021-63526630. Share the student’s grade, time zone, current strengths, team status, target preparation period, and the skill that feels most uncertain. Scope, schedule, instructor availability, and fees are confirmed individually before service begins; no public price is asserted on this page.