In August 2023, I won the GUB Junior IDPC (Inter-Department Programming Contest) — my first competitive programming win. As a second-year CSE student, competing against seniors felt intimidating. Here's how it went.
My Background Going In
I had been solving problems on LeetCode and Codeforces inconsistently for about a year. Not a serious competitive programmer by any stretch — maybe 150 problems solved total, mostly easy/medium difficulty.
What I had going for me: I solved problems systematically. QA thinking applies to competitive programming more than people realize.
The Contest Format
- Duration: 3 hours
- Problems: 8 problems, varied difficulty
- Language: Open (I used Java)
- Team/Individual: Individual
My Strategy
First 10 minutes: Read everything
- I read all 8 problems before writing a single line of code. This gave me a mental map:
- Problems 1-3: Straightforward (string manipulation, basic math, array)
- Problems 4-5: Moderate (greedy, implementation)
- Problems 6-7: Hard (graph, DP)
- Problem 8: Very hard (skip entirely)
Order of attack
- I didn't go in order. I attacked by estimated time-to-solve:
- Problem 1 (10 min) → AC ✓
- Problem 2 (15 min) → AC ✓
- Problem 3 (20 min) → AC ✓
- Problem 4 (25 min) → AC ✓
- Problem 5 (35 min) → WA, fixed in 10 min → AC ✓
- Problem 6 (45 min) → AC ✓ (graph BFS)
- Problem 7 (remaining time) → partial only
6 solves was enough for the win. Most competitors got 3-4.
The Problem That Almost Beat Me
Problem 5 was a greedy scheduling problem. My first approach was brute force — it worked on sample cases but TLE'd on the actual test cases.
I had to recognize it was a greedy problem: sort tasks by deadline, process in order, skip tasks you can't complete. Classic greedy insight. The 10-minute fix was recognizing the pattern.
What Competitive Programming Teaches You That Algorithms Classes Don't
- Time pressure reveals your actual understanding — you can't look things up
- Wrong answer is better than no answer — partial points exist, and debugging live is a skill
- Reading the problem carefully is 30% of the solution — many WAs come from misreading constraints
- Knowing when to quit a problem — sunk cost kills rankings
I've since placed 1st Runner-Up in GUB IDPC 2024 and 2nd Runner-Up in GUB CSE Carnival 2024. Each competition taught me something new about staying calm under pressure.
That, more than any algorithm, is the real skill.