Hey everyone, seeking help :)!
I am currently mentoring a group of students for the upcoming finals of the Syrian Olympiad in Informatics Qualifiers, and they’re right at that stage where a single story from someone like you could change their lives! The students have big dreams and huge potential, but I noticed some lack of motivation among them.
That's where you come in! How was your journey in CP? Was there a moment that made you realize that it was all worth it? Any hidden benefits you'd like to share? Your answer could be exactly what the students need to lock in for the competition.
If you'd like to speak directly with the students, please don't hesitate to contact me! I'd love to connect you with them.
i have a story to tell
go ahead!
Terrible, I shouldn’t have wasted the last few years of my life on this worthless activity. If I really wanted to spend so much time staring at (sometimes) colored pixels on a screen, I should have just continued investing in cs skins.
Choking with a one-line bug in a cancerous square-root decomposition solution for an ICPC problem which everyone with an lct template easily cheesed. “The moment” here would probably be spotting the bugs in my code on the ride home, fixing them to get AC, and frantically searching for a spare nitrogen can in my vicinity.
Ah yes, where do we begin?
Final advice? If you aren’t naturally talented (capable of achieving >= 2800 or so), it’s probably best to lock out and not waste any more time on these silly problems. Solving them isn’t going to make you smarter, it’s only going to drag you closer towards the insurmountable skill barrier that is otherwise shrouded with uncertainty when you’ve solved fewer problems (so you do not have to acknowledge the unfortunate truth that you’ll never achieve anything meaningful here).
If you’re here for the even sillier reason of getting better employment opportunities (relative to the reason “it’s fun”, which is also silly because video games are objectively more fun), the case for you to leave is even stronger: AI is going to be doing your job in an year anyways.
Geothermal
relative to the reason “it’s fun”, which is also silly because video games are objectively more fun That's so relatable.
I feel like as much as I agree with almost all of this, I still can't regret the experience because it's still a grind. I mean, the people you meet along the way have the willingness to do hard work to improve even if it's not actual improvement, so it's like a nice place for making good friends. Olympiad in Syria has some training camps, so that's a bonus.
From my perspective, almost everyone I met through the Olympiad is successful in some way, which somewhat supports my point.
Looking back, I really don't think I would've done a lot of things in life if I weren't in a place with disciplined people.
I don't think you should take a post that contains the phrases "super-charged inceldom" and "I should have just continued investing in cs skins" at all seriously.
I know :)
The comment just had a lot of relatable things, even though it looks like it shouldn't, so I took the time to reply rationally.
Investing in cs skins would be so dumb on his part, with recent fall he would've lost thousands. He's lucky to still partake in cp, rather than that.
I wonder if you’re clueless or just genuinely dumb (as your cf rating indicates), the only people who lost money were people who had most of their money in gloves and knives (and most people with only mid-tier knives had a lot of coverts, which resulted in them making back their losses and then some). I sold most of my inventory back in 2022 when I quit cs (about $2k at the time, and would be close to $12k today). Luckily, I had $100 in glove cases on another account that I forgot to cash out, and they’re up insanely high from when I bought them ($0.5 in 2020 to $30 now).
Also, most of my friends who didn’t quit (and instead spent time actively researching the market and spamming profitable tradeups (of which there were many due to all the volatility)) made thousands. Don’t yap about things you know even less about than CP.
It doesn't matter what you had in your inventory, your poor decision making would've still led you to losing money.
damn, you don’t know how to read either
Sorry, not really used to reading low-iq content.
no internal monologue?
moving forward, why don’t we restrict you to expressing 1 or at most 2 bad opinions per decade
When I first joined the national team in 2019 I spent quite a while bumbling around aimlessly because at the time there wasn't much of an olympiad community in Latakia. For the most part I was just opening CF and solving random problems, by late 2020 I started having one-on-one training sessions but I still didn't feel like things were clicking very well. I managed to reach specialist by mid 2021 but I struggled to advance to expert and kept slipping back to pupil.
I think the event that gave me that final push forward was the training camp I attended in August 2022. I came to love CP for its own sake which really let me push forwards and I went from 1278 to 1940 within 3 months. Unfortunately the pressure of NCD 12th grade prevented me from maintaining this rating and I quickly slipped back down, though I still finished 5th on the IOI team selection by 4/900pts :'). I had planned this to be my retirement from CP but ended up doing SCPC teens because I didn't want my career to conclude with such a close failure, and we won a silver medal nationally and qualified to regionals (which I unfortunately couldn't attend due to last minute paperwork issues ;-;). Then I considered myself retired fr fr this time, but long story short I ended up going to SCPC twice after that :p.
My life story aside, I feel the two important points that your students could benefit from are "training and community are important" and "love competitive programming for its own sake". I wouldn't have taken 2 years from start to specialist if I had better access to training and community in my first years. And in my later years the aspiration to get an IOI medal for university applications certainly was there, but my main driver forwards was loving CP itself.
If you'd like to, I'd love to have a quick online session with your students to tell them about my story and answer their questions.
That would be great I'll connect you with the students.
I recommend my series of Ten Years of Competitive Programming.
You are a very good story yourself. After working hard at Pupil and Specialist levels for over a year, you never gave up despite failure, and finally quickly broke through the three levels of Expert, Candidate Master, and Master consecutively.
Thank you for reminding me. Despite that, my story doesn't give enough purpose. That's the problem; the students do have potential they already passed 3 qualifiers.
I am already 14 years old, but I still cannot pass the provincial selection in my country. They are really talented to pass 3 qualifiers.