Tina Li: Bringing up the standard

To Tina Li, math is “beautiful.”

“I think that mathematics is just really wonderful because it’s kind of the basis of all of our operations in real life,” Li said. “But it’s also really complex in that the problems that we have in our daily lives to consider the different aspects of operations that we kind of take for granted. All of that is on the basis of mathematics.”

Despite anticipating future challenges, Li, a senior, plans to major in math at MIT – as the co-vice president of MAO, Li said she draws motivation from seeing herself progress. 

“I just want to keep improving all the time, and improvement comes with practice, which is how I’m motivated to keep practicing,” Li said. “The improvement can be shown, or I guess put on paper, through competitions and stuff. So that’s just kind of a good marker to see, like, hey, I’ve practiced a lot, I’ve done a lot of work, and this has made me become better internally.”

Li, a 5-time qualifier for the American Invitational Mathematics Examination and a 3-time qualifier in the USA Junior Mathematical Olympiad, said her experience in contest math pushed her to rely on this internal motivation to keep going.

“It’s pretty demotivating to see when you go to competitions, there’s always a lot of guys there,” Li said. “You also see that even though there may be women at these competitions, it’s mostly the men who are speaking and whose voices are being heard and who are discussing things.”

Though Li advocates for leveling the playing field in STEM for men and women, she said the process of doing so shouldn’t be biased, or cast as a “pity thing.”

“I think there’s a lot of sentiment that because there’s a strong push for women in STEM, that the women accepted are held at a lower standard than the men are,” Li said. “I just think that’s so incorrect. We want to encourage more women to be in the field to bring that up to that standard…because it’s a hidden talent that we need to unlock. Just because they’re not motivated and they’re not encouraged, that makes it so that there are plenty of really amazing, talented women who aren’t showing that talent because they’re unable to.”