After a year of grinding, I finally reached Expert!

Hitting Expert feels great, but ratings are not stable: one bad contest and the whole thing can vanish. So I figured I should post this before I am no longer Expert, share my journey to get here and what I had to do to improve, hope it helps you improve too!

I started competitive programming on Codeforces without really knowing what I was doing. My first contests were hard, I was averaging around $$$9000+$$$ rank, barely solving anything on time, and mostly just trying to understand how people were so fast. But I kept joining contests.

I began practicing outside of contests, reading editorials, and learning algorithms on Codeforces. My average contest rank changed from $$$9000$$$ to around $$$\textbf{5500}$$$! And that was enough to reach Pupil for the first time. It felt huge! My first real sign of progress.

After that, $$$\textbf{I started LeetCode}$$$, with more consistency, better problem recognition, and implementation, I pushed my average rank to about $$$\textbf{3000}$$$! That was when I started to believe I could actually climb higher. Becoming Specialist made me remember when I said: "I just HOPE I can get 2 problems". And now: "Problem C $$$1500$$$ score distribution? Easy".

Expert was the toughest so far. I had to fix bad habits, stop rushing, and reduce silly mistakes (but I still forgot to add memo.clear() in last problem D which cost me like 20 minutes in the contest!). My average rank slowly got down to around $$$\textbf{2000}$$$, that’s when I finally hit Expert!