Two teams represented York at the 2018 regional programming contest. They competed against 98 teams including multiple from Waterloo, U of T, MIT, …. I am afraid that the problems this year really were too hard. The red team (Justin Su, Chonglun Allen Chen, and Phan Ngoc Tien) ranked 9th on the practice run and 41th on the hard problems. They were very close to getting another of the problem. For me this is respectable. Everyone ranked 61-98 got zero problems solved, as was the case with our gold team (Junlin Chen, Hoang Minh, and Jacob Jae). They were just on the edge of getting a few of them. Also respectable. We had lots of fun and it is great job preparation.

Some students recently went on a Lassonde-organized trip to Silicon Valley, where they met with York alumni who are now working for the big software companies out there. Among the alumni were Andrew Evdokimov and Joy Choi, who both told the current students that doing the practice contests were extremely useful preparation for them to make it through the interview process at Google and end up with jobs they really like. So, students are benefiting from the contest preparations.