IOI: International Olympiad in Informatics
CIIC: Competencia Iberoamericana de Informatica y Computación (Iberoamerican Competence in Informatics)
OK, so this is like the fifth time I try to write this introductory paragraph and it’s just not working for me. Sometimes I can’t find the correct words to say what I want to say. I guess I don’t want to sound egocentric, but it’s just difficult when you talk about your “achievements”. So I’ll skip the introduction, and we’ll all imagine I wrote something magical and exciting here.
It’s been more than a month I’ve been away from writing, because it’s been more than a month I’ve been busy with final exams and projects. It went great, actually, so I can be proud of myself for that.
Anyway, let’s start with our story.
When I was 13, I participated in a mathematics olympiad for the first time in my life. It was a small olympiad in my city, I spent like a week or two preparing. I remember almost everyone in my grade participated, so for me it was as if I was just one participant out of many.
I didn’t expect anything, I actually was hoping to get some 5th place recognition in the best of the cases.
But when the results came out, it turned out I had won a gold medal. I was shocked, I was happy, I felt like for the first time in my life, I wasn’t just one of many, I was a winner.
Of course, it was a small olympiad, but it really motivated me to keep on that path. The next year, I started participating in Informatics, and that’s when I believe things started escalating.
I owe a lot to the professor that used to teach me in my early days. He didn’t teach me a lot of stuff, but the motivation he gave me was something that was worth more than any knowledge he could have given me by that time.
Time passed, and that same year I qualified for the first time in a national final. It was my first experience, so it was really frustrating. I had no idea of how to use the judging system; I didn’t know why the evaluation was so strict, and I definitely didn’t know all of the syllabus.
On the day of the closing ceremony, I woke up nervous. Somehow, I knew I had won something. Deep inside of me, I knew.
When they called my name to receive a bronze medal, it was one of the best moments of my life. I ran and, with the biggest smile in the world, received my medal.
It was a happy ending for me, but it turned out that was just the beginning; not even a month later, I began receiving emails inviting me to participate in additional competencies and compete for a spot on the team that would represent Bolivia in the IOI 2014.
Of course I didn’t care; I was happy with my bronze medal and I knew I didn’t have a chance to be one of the top 4 students in Bolivia, so I just kept participating as a hobby.
Anyhow, that year I qualified to participate in the CIIC. That was my first experience as an international competitor, and it was completely awful.
After all that year, in which I passed from being just Diego to being just Diego but with a pretty participation certificate from CIIC, I didn’t grow that much, my mentality stayed almost the same.
But during that year, the most important thing I gained was friends.
I started this super healthy and always amazing rivalry with one of my best friends, Rodrigo. I met some people who became more and more important in my life throughout the years, like Jhtan, Willmar, Alejandra, and many others.
But mainly, it was a beginning, and I personally consider it a great beginning, but of course it could have been better, I could have done better.
Later that year, I saw my friends participating in the IOI 2014, and I realized that it wasn’t as impossible as I thought. I had the mentality that participating in an IOI was the hardest thing in the world, and when I finally saw the types of problems and the grading system, I realized it wasn’t like that.
So, my next objective was to qualify for the IOI 2015, because I finally knew that it wasn’t as impossible as I had imagined.
Moving fast forward to 2015, I won a silver medal in the nationals, and during the qualification process for the IOI 2015, everything was quite difficult. There were five guys fighting for only four slots (I mean, we were closely fighting for the top four). As you can imagine, it was exhausting and stressful right up until the final second of competence.
When it was all over, the final results showed that I had won the 4th position, and I was going to represent Bolivia in the IOI 2015. I remember the first thing I did was hug a friend from Potosi. I really don’t remember why. We weren’t actually close or anything. I think he was just the closest person to me.
I felt like I’d reached the peak of my achievements. I could not until today show how amazingly right I felt at that moment.
But yet again, it was just another beginning. I hadn’t won anything yet.
I believe that one of my biggest personal issues at that time was that I felt like no one actually saw my worth or my efforts. Everyone was just busy saying I was lucky. When I did things right in some contest, it was because Diego was lucky, but when someone else did things right, they were geniuses.
Except for two people, Mauri and Marcelo, these two friends actually always said to me that they thought I was actually really capable and that I could and should do better.
Three weeks before we had to travel to Kazakhstan for IOI 2015, we had to compete for CIIC once again. I didn’t have great expectations for this competence, i just wanted to do as well as possible, but when the contest ended, it turned out I was the best result in Bolivia, and I had won my first Iberoamerican Bronze medal, but of course, I was lucky, right?
Finally, when we traveled to Kazakhstan, I was given my beautiful contestant credential, which said “BOL-1 Diego Angulo Ramirez”. The number one was because of my last name.
A lot of things happened during that competition and during that trip, and of course many more things happened after all that, but this post is already really large, so we’ll stop here, and I’ll finish the second part in the next few days.
Yes, we looked like criminals in our official team photography.
Thanks for reading, I hope to see you around soon.
BTW, do I have many grammar mistake? I hope not…
En memoria de mi abuela Irma, quien confio inmensamente en mi mucho antes de que empezara a conseguir logros.