
Alumni Chats: Adrienne Carmack
Inspired by her mentors as a young Mathlete, Adrienne Carmack is paying it forward. Adrienne is a senior manager in youth leadership and has previously worked for Hardy Girls, the Arizona Advocacy Network and Foundation and The LGBT Community Center. She has also worked with Girl Scouts of Maine through AmeriCorps. Adrienne studied education and gender studies at Colby College, with a minor in data science. She also earned her master’s in education policy from the University of Arizona.
We talked with Adrienne about youth development, mentorship and confidence.

November 2024
You work in youth leadership. Can you tell us a little bit about your job and what you do?
I oversee the youth initiatives that we have at my organization, which is a national substance misuse prevention organization, so I manage a number of programs at both the national and state levels with the rest of my team with a focus on public health and youth-led advocacy. My career has mostly been focused on organizations that promote youth leadership as an important part of positive youth development. I'm new to the prevention world, but all of my work has been really adjacent to that, whether I was working with girls and non-binary youth in my work at Hardy Girls, or when I was working at the LGBTQ center in New York City working with queer youth, or when I was doing community advocacy in the voting rights space.
What drives you to do advocacy work? What makes it rewarding?
At this point, I can't imagine not doing advocacy work. I think it came pretty naturally to me.
I took a gap year between high school and college, and during that time I was doing AmeriCorps with Girl Scouts of Maine. Then throughout college, I got involved in a lot of local activism and learned that that was something I could do with my career, which was very exciting. I'm really passionate about a lot of issues, especially gender equity and gender-based justice, and everything is very interlinked. That’s sort of how I found my way into this work and finding that I really loved working with young people in spaces that were non-traditional in that they valued taking young people seriously as partners and not just as future leaders or as students that needed to be taught before they could do things. Young people bring a lot of value to activism and advocacy spaces, whether that's in LGBTQ rights or in substance misuse prevention policy efforts. And I loved doing that and actually learning a lot of the social science behind it.
The importance of out-of-school programs—which MATHCOUNTS would fall under, too—is something that feels really close to me, I think in part because I had a lot of opportunities to participate in them. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how much it meant to me to have those opportunities, and there are so many young people that might not have opportunities like that. My work can help create opportunities both one-off and at a systemic level.
Not only did you compete in MATHCOUNTS as a student, but you also coached a MATHCOUNTS team. How did your experience as a Mathlete inform your coaching?
I had an amazing MATHCOUNTS coach, Steve Lammert. He was just the best. I felt so excited to go to practices. They weren’t cutthroat, but he took us very seriously, and so I definitely felt inspired to join.
When he moved, we needed new coaches. My mom and another parent stepped in, and I was available because I was taking a gap year, so I helped out as well. I really wanted to create a similar environment to what I had. It felt rare to be in a math-centered space that was also very fun and helped me build strong friendships and let me compete, which I love. I think for all those reasons, I wanted to be a part of coaching.
I think in an alternate universe, I am a math teacher or an engineer. There were so many times when the road split and I could have gone another way, and I could still see myself doing that. But I think having that coaching experience at a young age influenced my career in the long-term. Being part of MATHCOUNTS coaching helped me realize how much I love helping young people find what they’re passionate about.
You co-coached with your mom, and your older sisters also competed in MATHCOUNTS. Can you tell us more about your family and how they influenced your experience as a student and a coach?
I have two older sisters that both did MATHCOUNTS. I idolize them. And I’m a competitive person—we’re all very competitive—so I wanted to do everything they did. My sister went to the national competition the year before me, and that lit a fire under me that I needed to go since Mary had made it. It was a really special opportunity to get to do that, and to compete with my sister and to be a coach. My mom is my role model, so seeing her step up to be a coach helped me choose to do that too.
You’ve taken a less STEM-oriented career path than you might have originally envisioned when you were younger. How do you still make use of the skills you learned in MATHCOUNTS, in your career and in your everyday life?
I think working with a team to solve problems is a part of my everyday life at work. MATHCOUNTS also laid a foundation for critical thinking skills, even outside of numbers-based work. The other piece is that I find myself really enjoying the parts of my job that are particularly math-based. A lot of program management ends up being budgetary, which might not seem exciting, but it’s important to think about how we can allocate our funding, keep track of cash flow and make projections. It’s really clear when it isn’t done well. So I really enjoy making budget spreadsheets, probably more than the average person in my role.
And looking at the ways we evaluate programs is also something I’m really interested in. Before my current role, I was the executive director of a youth nonprofit in Maine, and I really loved looking at the ways we could use qualitative and quantitative tools to evaluate the impact of our youth programs. Goals like building confidence and building civic engagement skills seem really big and abstract, but there are ways to measure them. We do that with our work now, because we want to use evidence-based practices, and that requires a lot of evaluation. I get to work with some really amazing evaluation practitioners, and I like that part of my job a lot.
Why do you think it’s important for young people to learn math skills even if they don’t end up becoming mathematicians or engineers?
You’ll use them in any field you’re in. Even if it’s not the vast majority of your workload or studies, having math skills will absolutely make you better and more effective at what you do. I think it is so important that we have strong math education, and MATHCOUNTS is a really creative and effective way to deliver math education.

What do you enjoy about working with youth specifically?
I mostly work with adolescents, teens who are really getting to build their worldview and understand the world and their place in it. Not that I’ve figured that out or any adults I know really have! But getting to provide them with the tools and scaffolding to build a healthy sense of self, and teaching them the critical thinking skills to interpret the world around them and determine what they’re passionate about and what they believe is just really, really special.
Young people are much less constrained by the boredom of adulthood. When we develop a program or training for young people, we put so much thought into youth engagement strategies—I’m sure this is true for MATHCOUNTS as well—and almost always the training could be just as engaging for adults. When we think about engaging adults in different topics, we don’t think as much about their learning styles or the ways they’re engaging with materials or how they need to process them. So, in some ways, I think the work I’m doing doesn’t need to just be for young adults. It could be for adults, and maybe everybody would learn better.
In your career, what have you learned about leadership? What do you think is most important for mentors to bring to a mentor/mentee relationship, and vice versa?
Something I’ve tried really hard to do and tried to imbue into the programs that I design and facilitate is the importance of having trusted adults in young people’s lives. MATHCOUNTS coaches can be that. I think a lot of times, what makes them really good mentors is that they take young people seriously. One of the things I’ve learned as a mentor and leader for young people is to make sure I’m showing them just as much of what I don’t know as I do know. I want to show young people that it’s okay to not know, and I want to be really honest when they ask me something and respond with something like, “I don’t know, but I’d like to find that out with you.” I think a lot of times we feel a lot of pressure, especially when we have young kids looking up to us to be a perfect role model, because that doesn’t exist. Showing up for young people as my authentic self in a healthy way with boundaries is something I really care about.
Gender diversity and representation is a hugely important topic in the STEM world, especially. Drawing from your experience working with organizations dedicated to empowering girls, like the Girl Scouts and Hardy Girls—what are some key elements to encouraging confidence in kids that are underrepresented or overlooked?
I want to be clear that I don't know a lot of the literature about gender equity in STEM specifically, but what I can speak to is creating spaces for young people where they feel confident and that they matter. For girls, genderqueer youth, LGBTQ youth, racial minorities and youth with learning differences and disabilities: seeing representation is really important. Even small things, like representation in word problems, can help create a space for young people who might not have the confidence, for a number of systemic reasons, to feel comfortable and confident and succeed in a program like MATHCOUNTS.
What helps you feel confident?
I had really incredible adults in my life who defied a lot of those gender expectations. My mom was a math major in college and a doctor, and I was told all my life, “Your mom’s a really smart woman. You get all your math skills from her.”
I also had a number of teachers and mentors who were really committed to gender equity in STEM spaces. I definitely grew up being told I could be anything I wanted to be, and I could do anything I wanted to do. I had these two older sisters who are so smart and so incredible that I was able to look up to. And I absolutely did not recognize how unique that experience was until later. My math team in high school was really female-dominated, and we had teachers and mentors who were so supportive of that. That gave me the confidence to keep going.
Do you have any favorite memories from your time in MATHCOUNTS?
I actually remember very clearly a lot of my time in MATHCOUNTS. We met twice a week in the mornings before school. Our coach would bring us Timbits, which are like the Tim Hortons version of Munchkins. So every week we would have our donuts and math. I remember really, really loving that time, even though it was at 7:00 in the morning.
Once we became coaches, we knew we had to still do the donuts.
Do you have any advice for Mathletes? If you could give advice to your middle school self, what would it be?
Ultimately this experience is about learning and less about the competition. Really focus on the practices and the relationships you’re building, because that’s what really comes out of your MATHCOUNTS experience, more than whatever place you got at state.
You’re based in Washington, DC, where the 2025 National Competition will be held. Do you have any recommendations for students and their families that will visit in the spring?
DC is the perfect place to visit with family. I recommend walking around the monuments at night if the weather allows. I think that’s a special experience, especially the MLK Jr. monument. That’s one of my favorites to see at nighttime.
Take advantage of the free museums. My favorite is the Renwick Gallery. I’d also recommend looking on the Smithsonian’s website because they are always having festivals and things going on in the different museums. I went to the Portrait Gallery the other week and they had an amazing event for youth to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month.
And there are great ice cream places. One of my favorites is a place called Malai, that has South Asian ice cream flavors. The flavors are amazing and the ice cream itself is some of the best I’ve had. I highly recommend it.
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