Edukus

This winter I have participated in Petrozavodsk winter programming camp as a part of Tartu University team. This was my first experience participating in such events, before I used to solve problems by myself during different online competitions.
During 10 days at Petrozavodsk we were solving problems side by side with the best competitive programmers in the world, 80% of participating teams are going to the ACM ICPC finals this year. Lots of participants were winners of international programming olympiads at school. It is very good experience to solve side by side with these guys and discuss problems with them, see how think, how they work, because when you see them online, you might think that they are probably some robots, but in real life everything is different. They are the same as you, and this gives you more motivation to solve and think more and harder.

We were solving problems everyday in the format contest and then discussion during lunch with other teams after lunch we had opportunity to listen to editorials from guys who have won ACM ICPC in the previous years, and in the evening we were always upsolving problems (solving the problems which we did not know how to solve during the contest, but which we know how to solve after discussions and editorial) to gain and understand new techniques and knowledge.

Overall it was very positive and motivating experience and I hope that in future we will have more such opportunities to learn and compete with the best guys in the world. Because only when you compete with the best you become better.

It was a pretty awesome event which I highly recommend to attend. I made a few pretty good connections with some people from the camp, with who I still have friendly relationships. After this training and several months training on my own, the team I was captain at got pretty good results on IEEEXtreme 2016 and Google HashCode 2017. I have learned much in sense of competitive programming during MIPT camp. I encourage more people to be sent to the training camp and more students to be involved in such kind of activities in general. In addition to that, we had an enjoyable excursion to Moscow.

I have been a participant of winter programming school provided by MIPT. It was extremely useful and exciting event. Participants have been divided into two groups: the first one consisted from finalists of ACM ICPC, the second who wants to be the finalist in nearest years.

As a participant of a second group, every day I participated in a programming context, attended lectures devoted to the next day context and later visited a meeting where authors of tasks explained solutions to them. Thus, in short period I gained a lot of new knowledge regarding competitive programming topics.

In addition to that, we had an enjoyable excursion to Moscow.

In short, I was fully satisfied by the level of organization as I got even more than expected during those days. In addition to that, I have a great possibility to met with guys who are in the top on Codeforces!