Hey all!

We hope you're doing well. Like last year, we're again looking to give back a little to the competitive programming community, in the form of mentorship. This mentorship is completely free. We're hoping to help aspiring competitive programmers do well at the ZCO, INOI and IOITC, and hopefully even represent India at the IOI!

We're setting up another Discord server, to mentor people trying out for the ZCO, INOI and IOITC. Last year, we had 16 people from our server qualify for IOITC. This time, there's a larger limit on the total number of people we can take, as we have many more mentors. However, we're trying to focus more on olympiad preparation this year. You're still welcome to apply if you think you'd benefit from Olympiad training but are ineligible for INOI.

We're also in the process of developing a resource similar to the USACO Guide, in order to help us organise our teaching better. Do note that we teach all the topics within the INOI syllabus, and also teach topics which can appear at IOITC and IOI.

Like last year, if you join the program, we'll help you by:

• Compiling useful practice problem sets to introduce you to a variety of different techniques
• Selecting problems to practice with
• Providing hints to solve problems in practice
• Discussing problems after a contest
• Recommending similar problems (if you’d like to reinforce a trick/observation)
• Providing debugging assistance
• Finding tutorials for classical techniques
• Hosting sessions to teach/discuss classical techniques (we now have a list of topics we'd like to cover in order, but we're usually also happy to teach other things as necessary)
• Hosting sessions to teach/discuss specific problems

If you think you'd benefit from mentorship, feel free to apply at our form here. We'll get back to you within a couple of weeks with a server invite link. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me with a message, or leave a comment here. The form will close on the 9th of July, 2021 at 12pm IST.

If you'd like to become a mentor (preferably with ZCO/INOI/IOITC experience), please also reach out to me(or socho) — we'd be glad to have you on board!

Thank you!

The current set of mentors is:

Me
socho
shiven
sahil_k
b23v
astoria
Aggu_01000101
ScarletS
kimbj0709
smjleo

Note: I would like to apologize for the name. It wasn't my choice. Ofcourse, DSU >> UFDS