At a venue in front of the Great Sphinx of Giza, senior Brian Xue received the title of third-place winner at the International Olympiad in Informatics. Despite the intense competition, his face, illuminated by the large lights above, glowed with a smile while he retrieved his medal in front of hundreds of spectators.
Xue coded for the first time when his elementary school offered a class teaching the basics of Turtle, a feature in Logo that allows users to “draw” using code. Two years later, he learned his first programming language, Python, using a self-study course online. As he got older, he became skilled in HTML, CSS, Java, JavaScript and C++.
“Although I self-learned a lot of the languages I know, I learned C++ from my family friend and Java from the AP Computer Science A class at Lynbrook,” Xue said.
In sixth grade, Xue began competing in the United States of America Computing Olympiad, a national competition. He was quickly promoted to the gold division in a few months, but soon struggled with moving higher.
“I hit a massive brick wall where the problems suddenly became very hard, and I was very disappointed with my lack of progress,” Xue said. “I felt like I could pursue other paths, so I switched tracks to do competitive math.”
Fortunately, Xue picked coding back up again at the end of eighth grade during the COVID-19 pandemic. Inspired by his friend who was doing well in USACO, Xue decided to give his old hobby one more try.
“My friend was improving very quickly, and I hoped that I could get better too,” Xue said. “Part of the reason was also because I missed coding, and competitive math got boring for me.”
To hone his skills in programming, Xue went to X-Camp Academy, an institution preparing students for coding competitions. Xue participated in the program the summer before his sophomore year, where he worked on many coding problems along with other students. For the entire summer, Xue practiced from 9 a.m.- 5 p.m., which contributed a lot to his improvement.
Soon, Xue was consistently scoring well in USACO’s platinum division. Due to his success, Xue was selected to participate in the USACO training camp the summer before junior year. At this camp, students continue to practice coding, and four students are selected to represent the United States at the International Olympiad in Informatics. Despite not being chosen that year, Xue participated in the training camp again the following year and was successfully selected.
“The camp would rank the students from tests that we took,” Xue said. “This summer, I was in fourth place, so I got to go to IOI.”
This year’s IOI competition was held in Alexandria, Egypt and lasted from Sept. 1 to Sept. 8. While traveling there for the competition, Xue and his teammates also visited Cairo to see the Giza pyramid complex and the Egyptian Museum.
“Not only did we travel, but we also got to talk with a lot of new people, including the members of teams from other countries,” Xue said.
The first day the team arrived in Alexandria, they attended the opening ceremony. The competition itself consisted of two days, with the competitors solving three problems in five hours each day.
“I felt immensely pressured during the competition,” Xue said. “It was very stressful because our entire team was so jet-lagged from the flight. While the competition lasted for five hours, I only had enough energy to compete for three hours of it.”
Despite being the only member on his team without prior experience, Xue placed third in the competition, making him first place in the United States.
“When I found out, I was very shocked and just in disbelief,” Xue said. “I was hoping for somewhere around 15th place or even the top ten if I got lucky, but I was not expecting to be third place in the world.”
In the future, Xue plans on continuing his programming journey by pursuing computer science as his career.
“I am really satisfied with my journey in computer science, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” Xue said. “I got to meet so many cool people that I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet otherwise, and the experience has improved my skills in different areas.”
