You guys may not have seen a light-hearted blog in a little while. So I made one. Enjoy!

So after that miraculous Silver Medal run in that 2023 ICPC Asia Hue City Regional Contest, our team went back to normal life and waited for more information. A few days later, we were announced as a participant in the 2024 ICPC Asia Pacific Championship (or in short, Super Regional), which is nice, although it's expected. So back to training, I guess?

In that gap time between the Regional and Super Regional contests, we still kept that positive mentality and practiced together like normal. The Lunar New Year and end-term exams from our university took a lot of time from us, but everything went pretty well and it was a lot of fun. Actually, my most memorable moment at that time was when I found out the Super Regional Contest would be held in VNU-UET, which derailed my happiness a little bit since I really like exploring things abroad. I'm proud our country was the first to hold this though.

Time flies, and that day arrives. That was 4 months ago, my god. We went to the contest site and met a lot of new people, personalities, and cultures. Everyone is very friendly and welcoming. As before, all we had was hope. The main target that we settled for this one was simply to have fun and perform decent enough since we knew we had almost no chance. So no pressure for us at all, and to the contest we go!

To be fair I don't have as much emotion as back then so I will make this pretty short. The same plot from the Regional Contest somehow happened again, since we were flying in the first 2 hours. We were even third at some point. And then we choked late and ended up 16th, which is enough for a bronze medal.

We were announced on-site that we did qualify for the ICPC World Finals since we were 12th excluding schools (and the top 12 are guaranteed for WF), and celebrated together with a lot of joy. And yeah, my dream came true. The ICPC World Finals dream that I settled to be the priority goal came true.

(And yes if we were actually 12th this blog would have existed back then. And not with this title.)

But here's the thing. After the contest, I found out (and a lot of people told me that as well) that out of five winners of each regional automatically qualified for the World Finals, one team actually finished right below us, and one did not participate. So we were holding the 14th ticket, a not-guaranteed one. So although almost everyone congratulated and convinced us to not worry that we wouldn't qualify (Including my teammates and coach, I'm truly sorry), since it's my dream after all, I just couldn't not think of that scenario, so I decided to be cautious and wait for the official announcement. I still felt a lot of joy since the possibility of us making it was much more than not, but not much compared to when I received the prize.

And we waited. I do think my teammates were cautious as well so we really did look forward to it. We thought we would receive the email around 2 weeks to a month, but after that time, there isn't one. I did pretend to be a person who qualified for the ICPC World Finals, but deep inside me, I feel like I have to wait. Day after day, week after week, I still check everything possible, but everything is still not there. My motivation to wait has tarnished a lot.

Recently there was a lot of work from my university so I don't check social media that much. I still visited the ICPC site 2-3 times a week, but nothing happened. Until yesterday evening, I asked one of my teammates if there was something new. He told me "I thought you read the messages?".

So I checked. And yeah, from my group chat there was a message that we verified the terms and qualified for ICPC World Finals. A message from 2 weeks ago.

Yeah. I don't know what to say other than the title of this video. Of course, I'm happy, my dream came true for real this time, and I finally can say that I am an ICPC World Finals participant. But I can't find a more stupid way to find out that a dream came true, since I waited for it for so long. I don't know how many times I apologized to my teammates that evening but I felt a lot of guilt and dumbness. This morning I finally received an email from the ICPC WF organizers, which is nice.

After all, now I can finally be relaxed. I reached my dream. On the first try. It's still one of the wildest journeys that I ever went. Again we can keep this positive mentality for the next contests and I really look forward to exploring new things (it's the first time I will ever go abroad), meeting and competing with the best teams in the world. And it goes without saying, thank you to everyone who believed in me, for encouraging and supporting our team to make this possible. We will try our best in the largest contest of them all. Of course, we aren't anyone, but to be able to be there and compete, I'm happy.

And a special apology to my teammates, please forgive my stupidity.

Once again I'm impressed you readers reached this point. Thanks a lot. I just want to say, if you have a dream for yourself, keep dreaming. Give everything you have, and miracles will happen. Success will come to people who believe. And to the ones that qualified for ICPC World Finals like us as well, see you in Astana!

Finally, I would like to go to the beginning of this journey and tell my past self, once and for all.

"I had a dream. Going to the ICPC World Final."

I did it mate. I did it.