pritishn's blog

What do ICPC-coaches in Indian colleges do ?
By pritishn, 4 years ago, In English

The reason for asking this is :
In our college ,our ICPC coach doesn't do any "coaching" work. :P

So I was wondering if the Indian teams , which are currently performing well, have good coaches for coaching them in college?
And I could have asked this in DMs but I thought it would be better to ask everyone at once. :P

I'm especially curious about those colleges who's teams have been visiting WF consistently (like IIIT Delhi, CMI , etc).

Can you please spill the beans? ;)

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4 years ago, # |
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aryanc403 , can you please spill the beans regarding your college? ;)

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    The answer is the same across colleges. They'll register you, that's it. I did hear of a faculty member volunteering to teach some students, but not sure what happened.

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      That's right.
      Faculty member volunteering incident.
      He has won the Best Faculty Award 7 times in the last 10 years. When he got to know that a team he registered qualified for ICPC Regionals. He offered them to teach DSA course (the course they were supposed to take in the semester after regionals) in the winter break. But all three had their plans and they decided to turn down the offer. There were some odd chances that he would have also taught them Advanced DSA (the course which I'm taking this sem offered by the same professor)

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        4 years ago, # ^ |
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        Wow, our coach teaches Operating System. Lol.

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        4 years ago, # ^ |
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        Ah, we invited him for WF but he was busy. ;-;

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4 years ago, # |
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Honestly I think very few people have serious coaches (i.e. who work with their students on a weekly-or-so basis).

I am still amused at that guy who said something like "oh you're from a first world country, obviously just have infinite money so you paid for coaching, here we don't have that opporturnity!" (I exaggerated, but that was the general idea).

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    Yeah, I don't think any of the Indian WF teams have coaches.

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4 years ago, # |
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I think mostly you're introduced to CP then the rest is usually your effort to talk to people (in your university, training camp, codeforces, discord, etc).

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    That explains why our coaches don't do anything. If "introducing CP to students" is a responsibility of the coach ,then almost 99.99% of the professors in India can never become actual coaches. They never tell anything about CP.

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      "introducing CP to students" might not be teaching CP stuff. For me, the people that introduced me to it were friends that had participated in ICPC regionals in 2016 then after that it continued being something that came from actual contestants (weekly contests organized by veterans + basic topics and problem discussion), not our professor. What our coach did (in terms of CP) was creating opportunities for people that didn't know about CP to be exposed to it and maintaining the weekly practice atmosphere (although if you want to get better weekly practice of 1 5h contest surely isn't enough).

      The point is, you're already here. You already have access to resources needed to continue your CP journey, you just gotta find them. For me, the "weekly contests organized by veterans + basic topics and problem discussion" served the same as discussing problems with other people, as in my first months I already had the motivation to dive head deep into problems I wasn't familiar and when they would introduce a certain topic (for example, segment tree or binary search) I already had some experience in that because during my individual practice I had encountered problems with the same ideas, so it just helped solidifying the ideas, not the same as expecting things to fall in your lap. As I said, discussing it with other people works the same way as you're exposed to different views of the same problem, there are some good CP discord servers where you can find people willing to do stuff like a virtual contest + post vc discussion and even editorial comment sections can be good sometimes.

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4 years ago, # |
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The only thing that our coach did for us was registration.

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    For us he don't even do that much ,that is he shares his mail and password made for ICPC email of him and tell us to do the registration ourself he just make some student handle this registration part!

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      Honestly, I wouldn't mind that at all.

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        4 years ago, # ^ |
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        I also wouldn't mind that but the main concern is that most of the people are aware of his password and also he doesn't change his password year by year thus almost whoever know his password have access to edit other teams registration or payment part. Thus it seems odd from security point of view!

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    Lol..My coach didn't even know what ICPC was. She just gave her credentials for registration. I guess this is the story in most Indian Colleges.

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4 years ago, # |
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How to know who is my coach for ICPC in my college. This year i want to participate . Should i ask my HOD ,Or is it ok , if i make some fake id and register myself .

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    Go check in the Baylor site if your college is registered or not.

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4 years ago, # |
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You guys are getting coaches?

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4 years ago, # |
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You guys have icpc coaches? Ours doesnt even know what competitive programming is,let alone icpc.

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4 years ago, # |
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Have the registrations for Indian ICPC regionals started?

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4 years ago, # |
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In my college, they let us register for ICPC, that's something we can't do without the coach. They give their computer to us for 5 minutes and let us register our team.

That's it.

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4 years ago, # |
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In the Meet All the 2019 World Finals Teams video, just 1/7 Indian teams appears with 4 members.

Maybe some of the other Indian coaches suffered from impostor syndrome ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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4 years ago, # |
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For me the real ICPC coaches were my seniors like Ashish Jeel_Vaishnav KharYusuf . I must say culture plays a very important role in indian colleges rather than coaches.

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4 years ago, # |
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Umm coach... My professors don't even know the difference between A.M and P.M. I get notifications at 1am every night that the scheduled meeting is gonna start. And all they do in a meeting is to count the number of students who are actually attending their lecture :|

Meanwhile our college just has one professor who knows what CP is and he's the mentor and coach for AtoZ every team that registers from our college from 2nd to 4th year.. Guess how he trains so many teams. LotsOfLoveAndLuck for the contest.

Allfactsafaik

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4 years ago, # |
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I think lot of Indian universities (atleast IITs) does not give a fuck about ICPC. They care about research. Actually professors seem to believe competitive programming is toxic to one's growth in research field.

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