congrats on RSI!

GOOD JOB GETTING INTO RSI.

Yeah there is a 99% chance you will make blue MOP.

Hmmm MATT BABBIT CHOSE RSI over MOP.

If I were in your situation I would choose MOP because I feel deprived since I haven't made MOP yet. Hopefully this year.

He should choose MOP because you are being deprived of MOP?

@yugrey Joshua Brakensiek chose RSI over IMO.

I think "How much do you want research experience" is the big question here. Research experience and "doing real math" are not the same thing here at all.

If you want only to do real math and not research experience, it's probably more helpful to go to Mathcamp or something similar/just spend your summer reading under the guidance of a professor.

RSI will (from what I know of; I have not gone to RSI myself) go to much greater depth than you have probably seen before. This will do a few things:

1.) It will show you how much math there is out there. This is actually a huge benefit, and this is IMO the biggest benefit in terms of "learning real math."

2.) It will show you what it is like to focus on depth. But do not take this to be indicative of all research; breadth done in a proper way can go deeper than sheer focus on depth. (If you do not believe me, read scheme theory and then maybe étale cohomology...)

So, think about how much you want to try to do research on one problem and decide based on that. The advice I've been given by various people is that if you have the option to learn graduate-level math in great breadth, you should do so, because the opportunity to do so will be less present once you actually become a grad student. So certainly don't think that to do real math, you need to spend all your time doing research right away.

Choose MOP. How do you feel about RSI?
Now change your mind to RSI. How do you feel about MOP?

This process usually works for me. Personally, I would choose RSI for reasons similar to pythag's.

Ask freakonomics.

^ People are just going to think that the question is complete BS.

bleh

btw is the standard protocol to ask to delay acceptance until after MOP/IMO results

MOP, RSI if you wanna do more research