Competition happens at the bottom. People at top are collaborating.
I read these words on Ravi’s status and immediately it hit me as something I have tried to pursue since my very first month in college. Collaboration has been a key factor in my overall mental well being aka happiness throughout my career and overall life advancement.
Enough with Competition
After going through 3 years of JEE coaching and having participated/succeeding in about all of the competitive exams including IJSO, RMO, KVPY, IChO, and JEE Advanced, I decided to put my foot down on competing.
I wanted to move away from being a loner pursuing achievements alone and instead tread on the path of teamwork, collective effort, collaboration and learning from as many people as I can.
Zero Contest
I hope not but Probably am the only person in my entire batch who never participated in a single short duration competitive programming contest. Yes you heard it right not even one because that’s what I decided in my first year.
I don’t want to be ranked or rated, it’s not fair why should a single competition rate me when I have already pursued enough excellence throughout 10-12th standard.
My lack of contest participation shouldn’t be confused as I never did DSA, its all visible on my Github as well as my Advent of Code journey over the years. I did DSA because:
- I love computer science and it is an integral part of
- I enjoyed learning about algorithms that make tedious computation easier
- I am a JEE kid so yes I enjoyed problem solving
Where is collaboration?
In my initial days at college I found a few places where collaboration was the only thing that existed and there was no as such competition between involved people.
This consisted of fest works and clubs primarily. For fest I got involved in FMC Weekend Publicity Team and for the club part since I had a new DSLR at home along with new found interest for travelling after going to Europe Trip and multiple others I chose The Photography Club IIT BHU.
I also participated in Aagman under Masquerades and IMC but since I was so bad at acting and singing I didn’t continue. But definitely the warm welcome you receive and sheer amount of efforts everyone puts to showcase the best team effort is amazing which I got to see first hand.
Software Development
As I was looking for places to collaborate with people I wanted to hone my technical skills. I ended up in COPS’s “Intro to Open-source Hacktoberfest” workshop. I was able understand half of it but free t shirts 🎽 was the reason I used by git skills from CS50. Then there was Google Summer of Code one which I didn’t give much attention because how can a first year clear it right? Well they did .
Anyhow in winter break I focused on honing by technical skills with COPS’s winter camp made a simple tic tac toe responsive web page ended up being the highest scorer in this task, Finally joined COPS (Club of Programmers).
Hackathon
I got my first hit of collaboration in Hackout, a hackathon organized by Headout under Technex 2020 some of us (me, shubhanshu, yash goyal and sanyu) who recently joined Software Development Group (SDG) of COPS decided to team up and build something. While I was dabbling with frontend using Bootstrap Studio, Yash and Shubhanshu were learning Django in a span of 36 hours and Sanyu was creating beautiful UI mocks. We did present something hacky after burning the midnight oil while some other fresher teams just gave up and stood 5th.
SDG Projects
During the COVID time many others joined SDG and we started creating multiple projects hackathon sites, internal sdg portfolio, technex website, discord and telegram bots, insti apps, etc. All this was full of learning and collaboration amongst people.
Capture the Flag
It was an initial phase of COPS Cybersec and I was one of the first few selected but my primary interest was in Software so I left it for SDG. Even though I left as I couldn’t manage time between both I always enjoyed the whole team coming together and trying to solve problem statements. We used to build on each other’s progress and fight through CTFs together as underdogs.
Open Source
Well this would need a separate blog altogether which I will someday write but my experience with Google Summer of Code, LFX Mentorship and Summer of Bitcoin made it clear to me that I would never stop contributing and being part of open source communities. The shear amount of growth, collaboration, advancement and impact that open source has for an individual as well as on the whole human race is just immeasurable.
Conclusion
I enjoy being competitive in a fun manner like sports, team bonding events, hackathons etc but certainly not in a manner that it can be used to rate me against other individuals. People are the key for me the more the merrier to a certain extent, the togetherness in team events where you win together and you lose together the support system is just amazing.
All my past experiences have lead me to places like open-source, microsoft, sdg, photog, etc. where collaboration is the key for growth and fun :P.