Junior Faculty - Topics Course Instructor

Teach At BEAM Summer Away

BEAM Summer Away Faculty Info

This page contains information about working at BEAM Summer Away, our residential program in the Hudson Valley and Southern California. We are also hiring faculty for BEAM Discovery, our non-residential program in New York City and Los Angeles.

This position is intended for those with work experience beyond college, including a post-graduate degree, a college degree, or equivalent experience. For current college students, please apply to be Counselor/TAs at our programs.

Change the lives of students with exceptional potential from underserved schools by joining BEAM as a summer faculty member! Introduce students to advanced math as they take their first steps towards becoming mathematicians, scientists, and engineers with BEAM. BEAM, a project of the Art of Problem Solving Initiative, Inc., is seeking instructors for a residential summer camp that gives underserved students a chance to excel in mathematics. Our residential camps run for 3 weeks over the summer in both Los Angeles and New York City (staff report for 4 weeks), and instructors teach two classes during the program.

Please click on the headings below to learn more about the BEAM Summer Away program, the faculty position, and the application process. If you’re ready to apply or have further questions, check out our FAQ page. We look forward to hearing from you!

Summer Program Job Openings

About The Program

BEAM Summer Away is usually a three-week residential summer program for rising 8th graders, the required first step of our nine-year support program BEAM Pathway Program. In 2020 and 2021, we ran BEAM Summer Away as a virtual four-week experience (spreading the same experiences over time to decreases screen time per day).

We aim to create a life-changing experience for all the students that attend. We expose them to mathematics that they've never dreamed of before. They join a community of peers, perhaps for the first time, all interested in mathematics, and we'll supplement that social environment with activities, field trips, and more.

After the summer, we support them through college graduation, providing them with the resources and enrichment opportunities needed to successfully pursue careers in math, science and engineering. You can see more about the program's details on this website (just explore the links above).

BEAM has served the New York community since 2011, and Los Angeles since 2017. As far as we know, nothing quite like this exists elsewhere: while many efforts in underserved communities focus on achieving minimum competency or basic exposure to STEM, we focus on advanced math from an early age. Our experience has been that the program really changes lives and serves as a model for outreach across the country, while expanding the talent pool for mathematics and related fields.

Academic Structure And Schedule

Students do roughly seven hours of math per day, divided among topics courses, problem solving, and independent study.

Students choose a different topics course each week. Topics courses meet for four hours per day (only two the last day), giving 18 hours of total class time. They cover topics in theoretical and applied mathematics — for example, graph theory, logic, cryptography, or astronomy. Each topics course is taught by one instructor and assisted by an undergraduate counselor. As a topics course instructor, you design the class. These classes are very exciting to design and teach! You can see previous course descriptions here.

All students take problem solving for two hours each day. They have two choices for this block, Strategic Math Thinking or Solving Big Problems. Strategic Math Thinking is designed to prepare students for future success in math contests, such as MATHCOUNTS, the AMC 8, and Math Kangaroo. The instructor acts as a math team coach, introducing student to contests, suitable problems, and how to approach them. Solving Big Problems aims to develop skill at sustained problem solving. This class explores more abstract and proof-based problems that may require several hours or even days of thought and experimentation.

Finally, in the evening before bed, students work on self-paced modules designed to develop their understanding of math fundamentals, with an emphasis on escaping from the rote strategies they've often learned so far.

One of our goals is to prepare students to enter mainstream programs for students with mathematical talent. Hence, we want to raise their ability to think abstractly, understand proofs, help them to see a "mathematical world" around them, and prepare them for more advanced problem solving.

Sample Weekly Schedule

Here's a sample of a schedule a topics instructor might have

| | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | 8am-9am | Breakfast with students | | | | | | 9am-10am | Teach topics course | | | | | | 10am-11am | | | | | | | 11am-12pm | | Staff Meeting | | | Staff Meeting | | 12pm-1pm | Lunch with students | | | | | | 1pm-2pm | Teach topics course | | | | | | 2pm-3pm | | | | | | | 3pm-4pm | | | | | Supervise assembly | | 4pm-5pm | | | | | | | | 5pm-6pm | | | | | | | | 6pm-7pm | Dinner with students | | | | | | 7pm-8pm | | | | | Sort students into next week's courses. | | 8pm-9pm | | Support students in independent study | | Support students in independent study. |

During the white open slots, you have no formal responsibilities and we mostly expect that to be a break or course planning time. However, there are a few other tasks you might use this time for instead, for example: helping with evening activities, recording student feedback for end-of-problem letters, sitting in on guest mathematician’s talk, attending student math relays.

Each topics instructor will have one week during the program when they don’t teach. During that week, they should take advantage of more opportunities to get to know studen