Seeing the latest blog by WeaponizedAutist, I think I can help those greys and greens by helping them test themselves if they should really give up.
I am a 3rd year Computer Science and Engineering Student. I never took CP too seriously. But since placements and internships are approaching, I must catch up and become a bit serious towards it.
- At the time of publishing this blog: I am rated 1359 at 107 problems.
- By the end of 3 months (When I will publish the sequel to this blog): I aim to reach a stable 1600+ rating (By stable I mean, it shouldn't be peak, I must have a non-decreasing graph around 1600s), and around 350+ problems with utmost consistency (Seems doable).
Point to be noted: I am quite a procrastinator, and end up giving up midway most of the times (You can see that by my current codeforces problems heatmap below). Perhaps, I think it's about psychology, I don't consider stuff too important to put in my blood and sweat.
But, I guess this blog will help me figure out if it's just psychology or if I am just uncapable of achieving stuff. This is because, through this blog I am going to announce something publicly, enforcing a do or die situation for me to not procrastinate and actually take stuff seriously.
If I succeed in achieving my goal, then anyone here can achieve what they aim. This public announcement binds me to be determined for those greys and greens who are everyday looking out for some or the other blog to become a cyan or blue, and let them know if they should actually give up or not
Also, if I succeed, I will put up a complete roadmap of what I did in these 3 months. But..If I fail, I will quit CP considering that WeaponizedAutist was right that some people must give up.
No, you should just give up.
In my opinion it is very hard to achieve such goals and here is why: Codeforces contests don't really measure the strenght in the beggining phases, rather they measure the brute speed and luck. I think setting such goals will only make you nervous during the contests, that will in turn make you slower and will decrease your chance of good performance. I believe the best way to improve is to not care about rating, and to just write contests with the goal of solving 1-2-3-4-5 problems. Rating will eventually come, it is just the matter of time.I would suggest that you don't make high rating as your early goal. Changing my mindset helped me reach Master.
I actually didn't do what you said, different things work for different people ig.
(See my graph, I think I can answer this one. Also take into consideration I am NOT a CSE student)
What I mostly did was, give a contest only when I feel fit. If it goes bad, grind for some days. (I didn't have to practice much, but processing a problem during the entire day does help with insights. when you are not doing anything, just think of some problems whose soln is known (That's what worked for me) (or maybe unknown) to you, will help you understand various lines of thinking to reach that).
I do love combinatorics as a whole and ofc CF has a lot on combinatorics.
Prove it.
Due to Codeforce's flawed comment system, I'll make sure that this blog gets pulled back to the top of the Recent Actions tab in three months.
Bump
I was right 😎
Its been 7 months and you still didn't achieve your goal lol.