A couple of friends and I are looking to give back a little to the competitive programming community. For this reason, we’ve decided to start a small mentoring program! We’ve tested out a few mentoring programs in the past, and we think we’re now ready to apply what we’ve learnt, to help other people learn.
If you join the program, we’ll help you by:
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
Hosting sessions to teach/discuss specific problems
You can specify additional things you might need help with in the form, and we’ll try our best to help you.
Since we’re receiving a lot of questions about eligibility and related concerns, we just wanted to clarify a few details below:
There is no age restriction for eligibility.
There is no rating requirement for eligibility.
You do need a Discord account in order to participate. Creating one is free, and we’ll be using a Discord server for communications, as we find it effective.
We will likely need to restrict the number of people we can help, in order to make the mentorship as effective as we can.
If you would like to update a detail on your form submission, please resubmit (instead of PMing us with corrections). We’ll look at the latest submission.
Some form submissions so far have invalid Discord usernames (i.e. are not in the format username#0123). If this is the case with your submission, please resubmit. We will not be able to invite you to the server otherwise.
If you’re looking to apply, please apply on or before Wednesday, the 4th of November 2020. If more space opens up in the future, we might open up the application once again in the future.
As before, please let us know if you have any further questions!
We’ve had a very large number of applications (about 4-5x what we expected). In order to account for this, we’ve increased the number of mentees to the absolute maximum we can possibly handle without overloading ourselves or compromising on mentorship quality (which is still our primary goal).
Another change we’ve made is to invite all applicants to the main server, but create mentee-specific channels for us to focus on. If you’re invited to the main server, we ask that you join and help out others. By helping out others, we’ll increase your contribution level (and then, when mentee spots open up, we’ll use contribution level to prioritise members).
We apologise for the delay. We’ve sent out the first round of emails a few minutes ago, and we’ll send out further emails over the coming days.
Please note that no mentorship slots are currently available, however, when mentorship slots are available in the future, we will prioritise people by their contribution on the server and willingness to help others. As such, we encourage you to collaborate and communicate with the others on the server!