Finding Time For USACO With A Busy High School Schedule
Here’s the full video where I discuss the same content in detail: Finding Time For USACO With A Busy High School Schedule
Most high schoolers preparing for USACO also have a ton of other commitments – whether that be juggling multiple AP classes, clubs, or other extracurricular activities. As a result, it might feel overwhelming to also have to find time to practice USACO on top of an already busy schedule. Hi, I’m Riya, and in this blog I wanted to share everything that I did to practice for USACO on top of everything else, eventually qualifying for USACO camp three times and getting into MIT.
Finding Quality Practice Time
When preparing for the USACO, emphasis should always be placed on quality rather than quantity in practice.
As a high school junior managing five AP classes, I often returned home after an exhausting eight-hour school day, attempting to practice for the USACO in those limited hours after school. Unfortunately, I discovered that despite spending a considerable amount of daily time practicing, my progress remained limited. Moreover, I encountered challenges in solving problems that I could have typically handled at other times.
On the flip side, I found that my progress was much faster during times when I was not exhausted from school and had a strong mental focus, achieving more with less time. Identifying times when your mental energy and capacity are at their peak is essential for the most effective USACO practice. So, how do you find these opportune moments?
Undoubtedly, practicing immediately after school, when mentally drained from academic classes and extracurricular commitments, is not the optimal period. Instead, weekends present an ideal window for focused USACO preparation, devoid of academic or club obligations. If weekend activities, such as volunteering, persist, consider relocating them to weekdays. Often, these activities demand less mental bandwidth, making after-school hours more conducive for these tasks rather than USACO practice.
Allocating Morning Time to USACO
If, after moving around your extracurriculars, you still find that you don’t have much time to practice on the weekends (or there’s no way to move your extracurriculars to the weekdays), consider allocating one or two hours in the morning to USACO.
Personally, I was able to add morning practice into my routine by sleeping earlier every day and waking up a few hours before school started. This way, I could prepare when I was focused and high-energy, rather than after class when I was exhausted. I could go to school without maximum focus or mental energy, but I couldn’t do the same for USACO.
Now, it’s important that you’re getting enough sleep if you want to prepare in the mornings. Without the recommended 8-9 hours of sleep each night, your concentration and cognitive capacity will naturally diminish. If you do not like sleeping early, another way of allocating time is to take a nap after school. Then, once you wake up, you’ll have a clear mind and mental energy to practice for USACO.
Misconceptions
Don’t interpret this blog post as saying that you should only practice for USACO when you’re in perfect mental condition! There will be times where you’ll inevitably feel drained during the period in which you’re supposed to practice for USACO, and that’s okay. The message I’m trying to get across is that you should aim to maximize the amount of time you practice USACO when you’re not feeling drained.
If you’re having a bad day or not feeling fully energetic, still put in time to practice and solve a couple problems. In the end, keeping a consistent schedule is more important than making sure that you’re only practicing at maximum mental capacity.
However, if you find that you’re consistently feeling tired whenever you’re practicing, something needs to change.
Maximizing Quality and Quantity
While it’s definitely true that quality practice is more important than quantity, you’ll always be better off maximizing both quality and quantity. The important thing to note here is to learn to say no to things. If, for example, you have a leadership opportunity at some extracurricular organization, but you don’t think it would be a significant addition to your college application, then it’s not worth taking. You could spend all the extra time that you just freed up practicing for USACO, or strengthening other activities.
Personally, I was president of my computer science club in high school. I was also participating in a Girls Who Code club, where I was also voted to be president. Instead of taking the position, I ended up swapping positions with the vice president. I figured that being president of two of these clubs would not significantly boost my application over just being president of one of the clubs, and thus stepping down from one of the roles would free up a lot of time for USACO practice.
In sum, do not be afraid to say no to commitments that don’t get you where you need to be (this is just good life advice in general too).
How to Practice Effectively
Beyond just finding effective times to practice, it’s also crucial to be practicing the right things – even if you are in peak mental condition, your efforts will be absolutely useless if you’re spending your time working on things that are irrelevant to your division. This brings me to the next topic I wanted to talk about, which I also happened to film a video about a while back: Why People Who Learn Lots of Algorithms for USACO Fail. The video features Yibo, who is a coach at VPlanet and a former USACO Finalist.
As mentioned in the intro, a big part of practicing is deciding what to practice and what not to practice. First and foremost, it’s important to know when you should learn a new topic that you come across.
When to Learn a New Topic
Generally, it is a good idea to learn a new topic whenever you come across a problem you cannot solve, and when you read the solution, it requires a specific concept that you do not already know. It’s very possible that such a concept could appear in the future, especially if the problem is from USACO and in your division. You should definitely look into the concept if you come across it multiple times.
If you are practicing with Codeforces problems, then this logic may not apply. Specifically, if you are practicing problems at a difficulty way above your division, there will likely be no reason to learn the advanced topic tested in the problem. For example, there would be no reason to learn segment trees as a Bronze competitor just because you ran across it in a problem rated 1800. As a general rule of thumb, don’t worry about learning concepts for problems that you encounter that are more than 1000 above your rating. In a Codeforces contest, go at most two problems beyond the problems you were able to solve.
Recently, the Silver and Gold divisions have seen a lot of harder algorithms and data structures not typically expected in the division. For instance, Silver contests have seen problems requiring the meet in the middle technique. Despite this, however, it’s generally still always possible to promote in such a contest just using the main algorithms and data structures in the division. Even if a contest problem requires some advanced concept, the cutoffs will almost always be lenient enough such that getting the first few test cases through a partial solution is sufficient to promote (given that you fully solve the other two problems). Plus, there’s really no way to prepare for an advanced topic showing up, because there are dozens of niche topics that could pop up. Thus, even with these advanced topics occasionally showing up, the expected value of learning niche topics beyond your division still isn’t high enough to be worth spending your time on.
What to do After Learning Every Concept
The hardest part about practicing for a division is the stage when you feel like you’ve finished learning all the topics, but still get stuck on a lot of problems. Reading the solution, you technically have the knowledge to solve it – but you still weren’t able to. The reason why this often happens is even though you are familiar with the topic, you have not yet learned how to apply that topic. Often, problems will introduce a lot of twists and abstractions where it is not at all obvious that you are even supposed to use the intended topic in the first place.
Getting past this stage really just requires you to improve your problem solving skills, and the best (and really only) way to improve these skills is to practice a lot of problems. Now when it comes to practice, quality is still far more important than quantity. In other words, spending a few minutes reading a question, barely thinking about it, and reading the solution after giving up will not get you anywhere, even if you manage to get through a bunch of problems really quickly. Sure, you now know what topic is used for each question, but you have never developed any actual problem solving skills to determine the topic and how to apply it for problems you have never seen before.
The most important way to ensure you are getting in high quality practice is to be hands-on with problems. Do not just sit there staring at the problem and hope that a solution will magically come to you! Draw out examples on paper, try different test cases, and look for patterns to develop your solution. When it comes to creating your own different test cases, try to make each of your test cases unique in some way – make sure you’re covering edge cases and extremes, as well as more average cases. Additionally, when you’re testing your solution idea against your test cases, try to figure out what specifically about the test cases make the solution work, and think about if there are any test cases that do not satisfy that.
How Long Should You Work on a Problem Before Giving Up?
While you definitely should never give up on any problem too quickly, spending too much time trying to solve a problem can be just as inefficient. So, when is the right time to call it quits and read the solution?
Generally, it’s a good idea to keep trying as long as you feel like you’re making progress. But at some point, if you get stuck and don’t think you’ve made any progress for 15-30 minutes, this is usually the point where you should get some external help (reading the solution, getting a hint, etc.).
Advice for Platinum Competitors
While it’s best to learn all the topics relevant to your division in Silver and Gold, this isn’t necessarily the case. There are a huge variety of topics that could pop up in a Platinum contest, with some showing up only once every few years. As a result, learning every single topic that could ever show up will quickly yield diminishing returns.
A better approach is to focus on practicing common topics like dynamic programming and graphs, as these problems always show up at least once in every contest. Mastering graphs would yield a much better expected return than mastering a concept that only appeared once in a contest 5 years ago. Thus, the recommended approach is to learn all the important algorithms and data structures in the division, but don’t bother with those that show up once in a blue moon.
Another difference between the Platinum division and the Silver and Gold divisions is the wide range of problem difficulty. Some Platinum problems will be pretty easy (maybe hard Gold level), but others will be so hard that even IOI competitors failed to fully solve them. As a result, don’t expect to solve every problem you encounter in practice – instead, focus on the easy ones first and work your way to harder problems.
The Biggest Time Trap When Preparing for USACO
The final component to an effective practice strategy is to make sure that you’re actually spending your time practicing – and not procrastinating. I’ve also filmed a video about this with Yibo: The Biggest Time Trap When Preparing for USACO.
What Does Procrastinating in USACO Look Like?
Certainly, the conventional methods of delaying tasks can still be observed in the context of USACO, such as watching television, taking a nap, and engaging in various activities instead of practicing as intended. However, a distinct form of procrastination is also widespread among many participants, where even though you may think you are being productive, you’re really just procrastinating.
One example of this type of USACO procrastination is spending your time “becoming a Codeforces rating or USACO historian.” Essentially, rather than practicing problems, you’re spending your time looking at past contests and seeing who did really well, looking at who the past finalists were, or even perusing IOI results to find the best competitors. All this information is interesting for sure, but at the end of the day not useful at all for actually advancing in USACO. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t do any of this, but make sure that you’re counting it as “fun” time rather than time actually spent practicing.
Another common form of USACO procrastination is spending your time reading a bunch of Codeforces blogs. Some blogs can definitely be useful, however many others are often about niche topics that will almost certainly never appear in a USACO contest. Even if your goal is to learn a concept relevant to your division, it is generally a better idea to get started by watching a Youtube video where they provide visual illustrations and examples rather than reading a fully textual blog.
Causes of Procrastination
Often, competitors feel inclined to procrastinate because they don’t really know how to study for USACO. They try a preparation strategy but don’t see results, so they’re not sure what to do next and end up procrastinating.
If you’re ever not sure what to do next, and find yourself searching on Quora, Discord, Coderoces, etc. to look for an “optimal” preparation strategy, this still falls in the category of procrastinating. You’re never going to find an “optimal” strategy – the best thing you can do in your position is to come up with any routine and run with it. If you notice any issues with the routine down the line, you can always iterate on your routine until you find something that works for you. The important thing here is that you need to start by doing something, which does not include googling.
Why You’re Not Seeing Results
Before you start evaluating whether your prep strategy is working, make sure you’ve stuck with it long enough (a good guideline is having solved 20+ problems).
If you still don’t think you’re making progress, consider how you’re evaluating progress in the first place. For example, if your metric is whether your contest results are improving, it won’t be accurate because contests are getting harder every year, or maybe you just weren’t as good at the problem that came up. Further, it’s possible that you have been making progress, but haven’t yet reached the threshold where you’re able to solve problems of a certain difficulty.
One way of evaluating progress is to look at the difficulty of the problems you’re able to solve. To determine how easy/hard a problem is, look at the promotion details in the corresponding contest to see how many people solved each problem (this no longer works for newer bronze/silver problems, but still works for all the older ones). Easy problems will typically have been solved by everyone, whereas harder problems will have a lot less solves. If you previously could generally only solve the easy problems, but noticed that you’re now able to get some of the medium level problems, that’s a clear indication of your improvement!
If, after changing how you evaluate your progress, you still feel like you’re not improving, it’s time to rethink how you’re practicing. One cause of little to no improvement is that you’re not solving problems at your level. For example, if you’re randomly picking problems to solve, they can often be too hard or too easy, which is not optimal because you won’t learn from them. Instead, make sure you’re finding problems in the sweet spot – one’s that aren’t too easy or too hard.
Sample Preparation Strategies
One method of preparing is to use Codeforces. Start at a rating where you’re only able to solve 25% of the problems and practice them until you’re able to get 75% of them. Then, increase the rating by 100-200 points and repeat the process.
Replicating this method is slightly harder for USACO because there isn’t a numerical rating assigned to each problem. However, you can still follow a similar process by solving the easiest problem of each contest, then moving on to the medium level problem in each contest once you’re comfortable, and finally solving the hardest problems.
Conclusion
In conclusion, effectively preparing for USACO amidst a bustling high school schedule is a multifaceted endeavor that hinges on strategic time management and focused practice. Riya's journey to USACO camp and MIT underscores the importance of prioritizing quality over quantity in practice sessions. By identifying periods of high mental acuity, such as weekend mornings or post-nap afternoons, students can maximize their practice efficiency. Moreover, it's crucial to balance the pursuit of quality with a sufficient quantity of practice, which may involve making tough decisions about extracurricular commitments.
Misconceptions about needing to be in perfect mental condition to practice should be dispelled; consistency remains key, even on off days. As for the content of practice, honing in on relevant topics and applying them through active problem-solving is more beneficial than passively absorbing information. For those in the Platinum division, focusing on common topics yields better returns than spreading oneself too thin across numerous niche areas.
Finally, avoiding the pitfalls of procrastination by engaging in meaningful practice and not getting sidetracked by less productive activities is essential. Progress should be measured not just by contest results but by the increasing difficulty of problems one can tackle. If progress stalls, reassessing one's approach to practice is necessary, ensuring that the problems worked on are neither too easy nor too hard. By following these strategies, students can create a tailored preparation routine that evolves with their needs, leading to continuous improvement and success in USACO competitions.