In the summer of 1996, a student named Laurecia sat down and wrote a short essay about why she decided to come back to Math Corps.
She wrote about the friends she’d made. The instructors who taught her. The Thursday meals where teams mixed together. She wrote that camp helped her improve her math grades the year before, and that she wanted to come back to do it again. She signed off saying she hoped to return the following summer too.
She was in middle school. It was her second year.
We’ve been thinking about that letter a lot lately, because 30 years later, the notes we get from students sound remarkably similar.
They talk about their TAs. About a concept that finally clicked. About wanting to come back, not because someone made them, but because something happened here that they want more of. The faces are different. The campuses have multiplied. But the feeling Laurecia was describing in 1996 is the same one students are describing today.
That’s not an accident. It’s the thing Math Corps has always been built around: an environment where students feel known, challenged, and genuinely excited to return. Where math becomes the context for something larger — confidence, community, a vision of what’s possible.
Laurecia mentioned in that same essay that she was thinking about becoming a sports engineer someday — designing prosthetic limbs for people who had lost them. She was 13. She had a plan.
We don’t know where Laurecia is today. But we’d like to think Math Corps was part of how she got there.
That’s why we do this. And why, 30 years later, we’re still here reading the letters, grateful kids keep writing them.
Applications for Summer 2025 are open. Learn more at mathcorps.org.
