Kumon Completer Credits Problem Solving and Time Management Skills With Success at MIT
Manaal Mohammed speaks softly yet confidently about problem-solving and time management skills and how they have helped her succeed.
Manaal just graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is working as a summer intern at Google before she returns to MIT this fall to enter the master’s degree program. And yet, she made time recently to speak with young Kumon Students at the center where she studied in Garland, Texas, and encouraged them to stay in Kumon and work hard.
“Kumon helped me work well ahead of my grade level in math (in middle school and high school), but I think the problem-solving and time management skills I learned were actually the biggest benefits of Kumon,” she says.
Problem Solving for the Win
Manaal says problem-solving skills gave her an edge at MIT, one of the top research universities in the world. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making through the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
“At MIT, the problem sets we are given to work through demand independent thinking and effort, so they follow a process similar to what I learned and practiced in Kumon,” she says.
She didn’t always understand the advantages she got from Kumon. In middle school, she dropped out of Kumon for almost a year because she questioned whether the program’s time commitment was worth it – especially since she was working years ahead of what she was doing in school. However, her mother and the Instructor at her Kumon Center persuaded her to return, and with their encouragement and some one-on-one time with her Instructor, she completed the math program in 11th grade.
“After I returned, I could see the connection – and that I had gotten so far ahead because of Kumon,” Manaal says.
She went on to an International Baccalaureate High School, where the advanced math skills she built in Kumon allowed her to skip algebra 2 – and go from geometry into pre-calculus, she says. “Then I was able to take higher-level calculus my junior and senior years,” she says.
Time Management Skills Pay Off
The time management skills Manaal honed with Kumon have been a huge plus at MIT, where they helped her juggle challenging classes with extracurriculars, work and other responsibilities. She said those skills were especially useful last fall when she was preparing for internship interviews.
Software engineering internship interviews center around algorithms and problem solving. Because interviewees are asked to solve a problem during the interview, students are given practice problems to prepare. Just as any Kumon veteran would do, Manaal carved out an hour per day during the fall semester to work through the practice problems.
Her thorough preparation paid off in a big way. She will spend the summer as a software engineering intern at Google’s global headquarters in Mountain View, California. “I’m excited about the opportunity this summer, especially because that’s what I want to do professionally. In the long term, I’m interested in pursuing a research scientist role at a software company,” she says.