Hoping to give students more opportunities and resources for competitions in programs like the University Interscholastic League, junior Brian Bahk started a competitive programming club.

 “There’s not enough avenues for people who want to compete in competitive programming right now,” he said. “We want to make computer science UIL and other competitions like the USA Computing Olympiad more accessible to anyone.” 

Computer Science teacher William Bugh, who sponsors the club, thinks the club will provide the chance for students to do more than what classes offer.

“Students will join for more opportunities at competitive programming,” Bugh said. “Some students also want to get better at programming in general, no doubt about that, but there isn’t much they can do as far as competitions go until their skills are increased.” 

Making a club was a first time experience for Bahk, and with it came challenges with managing it.

“It’s pretty difficult if you want to make a co-curricular club, especially a co-curricular club that’s participating in a lot of competitions,” Bahk said. “Every single one of those competitions needs to be approved and looked through, it’s very time consuming.”

The competitive programming club is the first club sophomore Alex Vats has ever joined. 

“I decided to join the competitive programming club mainly because the club aligned with my interest,” Vats said. “Another reason is that this club provides an environment of like-minded people who share the same interests as me. These competitions will benefit me by not only furthering my knowledge of programming and algorithms which will help me in my future career.”

For the year, Bahk and other officers have both a main goal and accountability goals that they are looking to achieve.

“Our goal is to increase the amount of people participating in competitive programming at Liberty,” Bahk said. “We also have accountability goals, like we want to get a certain number of people into silver for USACO.”

Bugh hopes that the success of the club will spread to the UIL computer programming team he coaches.

“I would love to get a very good team from the club and we have some very good ideas along those lines, that we’re going to do competitions and track members’ scores,” Bugh said. “And the idea is, for example, that the highest-scoring people would have the first shot at being a part of the UIL team.”