Skill Series #2: Workshop on Introduction to Competitive Programming

For a long time, there were several thoughts running in my mind.. A lot of planning went in a few months ago about how to help junior girl students of my college do good in tech.. There were a lot of ideas and workshops are the first step.. I had waited for someone to start something before I realized that I should be that “someone”.

As a part of Lean In, IIT Kharagpur, there was a workshop held on Introduction to Competitive Programming. A skewed gender ratio among the competitive programming(referred as CP hereafter) enthusiasts in the campus motivated me choose this as the theme of the second Skill Series (first in Tech) workshop. This idea was encouraged by my senior Ayushi Mrigen (she started Lean In in my college). I spoke to two of my seniors(Harsha Vardhan Ponnada and Srinidhi Bhatt) who were interns at Google and are awesome Competitive Coders. They quickly agreed to be the speakers of the workshop. I wanted the first workshop in the series to mainly focus on 3 aspects

→ Why CP?

→ What is Standard Template Library in C++ and how is it useful in CP?

→ Various contests, practice platforms, resources etc.

There was an overwhelming response. There were a lot of registrations, specially from junior students without much knowledge in CP. As a result, we decided to take it a step further and have an external guest, on video call.

Nishant Redkar has been working in Google as a software engineer for 11 years. With tremendous experience in competitive coding, he has collected many accolades along the way. Once a topcoder red; he held the position of rank 1 in India on Topcoder for a long time. He is presently actively involved in competitive coding as well and has constantly been a finalist at competitions like codechef snackdown for the past several years. He consistently sets problems for codejam kickstart, and has taken over 200 Google interviews!

There was a good turnout finally. People really enjoyed the session. The workshop touched upon various aspects and gave an insight on how to start CP to newbies. Nishant’s talk was amazing! He walked us through his journey from a nerdy student to an awesome CPer. It was quite motivating. Overall, I have learnt a lot organizing this. I’d consider this a huge success if it pushes at least a few of my junior students dive deep into CP. I thank Nishant Redkar, Harsha Vardhan Ponnada, Srinidhi Bhatt for making this possible and special thanks to Ayushi Mrigen for everything!

Here are some pictures taken during the workshop.

Here is the presentation used.