Kushagra Juneja, a student of FIITJEE Punjabi Bagh Centre, New Delhi, has won the bronze medal at the 27th International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) held at Almaty, Kazakhstan.
About 320 students participated in the Olympiad from 80 countries in the final round. India was represented by a team of four students, including Kushagra. IOI had two five-hour tests conducted on two different days in which participants had to solve six problems and code on computer programming language. Each question carried 100 marks.
Kushagra had to pass through three stages before making it to the finals.
This is not the first time that Kushagra has won an international title. He was crowned as the world topper and a gold medallist in the International Junior Science Olympiad in 2014.
“My experience at the IOI was fabulous. I interacted with the students from around the globe and learnt about their customs and traditions. I also learnt how they study computing in their country,” said Kushagra, after returning to India. “I developed many problem-solving skills during my preparation which would be very essential in my later life, especially in areas such as Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics,” he added.
As an advice to juniors participating in the Olympiad, Kushagra said, “Although we were allowed to program in either of these languages — C, C++, Java and Pascal — it is mandatory to know at least one of them. Since time is also an important parameter in competitions like IOI, I would recommend learning C++ because it's Standard Template Library(STL) is awesome.”
Kushagra intends to become a computer engineer from IIT. “A sizeable part in Computer Science Engineering pertains to programming and algorithms and this competition teaches just that,” he says.
