Happy ‘Personal Competitive Programming Day’ to myself!

It was October 18, 2017. Shohag, a melancholic soul, made a strong determination that he will pursue Competitive Programming seriously, by heart, because he found it fascinating. Fast forward to 4 years, he is happy that he took this road.

In my early days at SUST, I somehow managed to find myself in serious depression due to not-so-serious reasons. One amusing aspect of depression is that after you get over it, you find those reasons for your depression somewhat weird. That was also the case for me. At some point, I considered getting admitted into Medical College too (haha, funny). Weird times those were. I literally did nothing at all apart from worrying about different scenarios or impossible outcomes. It’s a waste of time to be depressed about things.

One simple thing struck me hard towards the end of my first year at university in October. That you can’t always change reality. You must accept what has happened to you. It’s a terrible truth but, you know, reality is a bitch. It’s better not to dwell on the past since it will only make your future worse. What I could do was to change my future as someone said, “It’s never too late to be who you might have been”. So I had to pick one thing that I would be good at. Academic stuffs bored me. Fortunately, math and puzzles have always been my favourites (thanks to my math-god father). So I took this firm decision that I would take CP seriously and will try to be good at this. As you can already guess, it was October 18, 2017, when I started the journey seriously by solving a problem named “Again Twenty Five!”.

It’s October 18, 2021. It’s been 4 years. Was it all worth it in the end? Well, when you love something, you don’t judge your efforts based on the outcome. The time you spend while having fun is not a waste of time at all. I may not have accomplished much, but you know, I did it for me, I liked it, I was good(albeit not the best) at it, and I was really… I was alive.