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How much institutions care about the contests can be a factor as well. I ended up as the only American placing in a data-mining contest once [1], which I entere

by mjn 13y ago

How much institutions care about the contests can be a factor as well. I ended up as the only American placing in a data-mining contest once [1], which I entered as a hobby I spent a few weekends on. But a full 5 of the 12 awards went to a single German university, RWTH Aachen, which had a ton of entries, and apparently had set it up as something students would do as part of a course. That does lead to the next-order question of why American universities don't care about such contests (if indeed they don't). [1] The 2009 UC San Diego data-mining competition, which seems to have disappeared from the web, but is archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20101124175648/http://mill.ucsd.edu/index.php?page=History http://web.archive.org/web/20101124175648/http://mill.ucsd.e...

Retric 13y ago
I had this discussion with one of my professors who basically said winning a CS or Math contest has little to no long term value for a student and the preparation required to win is not particularly useful.
- mjn 13y ago
  Math departments seem more interested in competitions than CS departments, at least at places I've been. American math departments are quite interested in the Putnam competition in particular [1], which has a kind of legendary status in the field that CS competitions don't, maybe because a number of the past winners have become famous mathematicians [2]. Where I went for undergrad (but not as a math major) they even offered courses to prepare for it, and scholarships for students who did well [3]. [1] http://math.scu.edu/putnam/index.html http://math.scu.edu/putnam/index.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition#Putnam_Fellows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathemat... [3] http://www.math.hmc.edu/putnam/ http://www.math.hmc.edu/putnam/
khawkins 13y ago
I had a similar experience. As an undergrad I actually competed in the ACM competition but we had barely enough interest for a 3-person team. Furthermore, I only found out about the competition the year I graduated; advertising was very limited. However, competitions like this are more focused on algorithms/math, which might not coincide with American universities' focus on software engineering. Hackathons, which do coincide, seem to be far more prevalent.

by mjn 13y ago

Retric 13y ago

I had this discussion with one of my professors who basically said winning a CS or Math contest has little to no long term value for a student and the preparation required to win is not particularly useful.

mjn 13y ago
Math departments seem more interested in competitions than CS departments, at least at places I've been. American math departments are quite interested in the Putnam competition in particular [1], which has a kind of legendary status in the field that CS competitions don't, maybe because a number of the past winners have become famous mathematicians [2]. Where I went for undergrad (but not as a math major) they even offered courses to prepare for it, and scholarships for students who did well [3]. [1] http://math.scu.edu/putnam/index.html http://math.scu.edu/putnam/index.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition#Putnam_Fellows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathemat... [3] http://www.math.hmc.edu/putnam/ http://www.math.hmc.edu/putnam/

khawkins 13y ago

I had a similar experience. As an undergrad I actually competed in the ACM competition but we had barely enough interest for a 3-person team. Furthermore, I only found out about the competition the year I graduated; advertising was very limited. However, competitions like this are more focused on algorithms/math, which might not coincide with American universities' focus on software engineering. Hackathons, which do coincide, seem to be far more prevalent.