Hey everyone,
I’m a student from Greece training for my country’s national informatics olympiad (ΠΔΠ), with the goal of making it into the national team’s training camp/bootcamp for IOI selection next year.
A bit about where I’m at: I’m working through the USACO Guide as my main structured curriculum — currently finishing up Bronze (should be done in the next week or so) and about to move into Silver, with the plan to go through Gold afterward. Alongside that, I attend weekly weekend classes specifically geared toward our national olympiad (split into beginner/advanced groups), and once I’ve got Silver solidly down, I’m planning to start working through every problem from the final selection round (“Γ’ Φάση”) of our national olympiad from past years, in parallel with Gold material. I can put in about 4-5 hours a day right now, which I’m treating as a pretty serious commitment.
What I don’t have is a clear picture of what the actual path looks like from where I am to an IOI-level camp — I only have theory and a plan I built myself, no direct experience or mentorship to check it against. So I’d really appreciate hearing from people who’ve actually been through this:
- How did your training actually look week to week, especially once you got to the harder USACO tiers (Gold/Platinum) or equivalent?
- How long did it realistically take you to go from “solid intermediate” to camp-qualifying level?
- What did you wish someone had told you earlier — mistakes you made, time you wasted, things you’d do differently?
- How did you balance this with school, and did that change as the competition got closer?
- For those who made it to a national camp or IOI: what did the selection process actually test for, beyond just “can you solve hard problems”? Was there anything about how you trained that specifically mattered for that stage?
- Any resources beyond USACO Guide/Codeforces that were genuinely useful for you at Gold/Platinum level or for olympiad-style (not just ICPC-style) problems?
I’m not looking for a shortcut — I know this takes real work and there isn’t a hack around it. I just want to calibrate my plan against people who’ve actually walked this road, since right now I’m mostly building it in the dark.
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share their journey — even a few sentences about what worked (or didn’t) for you would mean a lot.