When IIITH’s Sushil Raaja Umasudhan won the silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI-2024) at Alexandria recently, it was his third international medal. He is currently ranked second in India and placed among the top 15% of the world’s top competitors. This is a motivating lockdown story.

Sushil Raaja Umasudhan is mad about programming. He started preparing for Olympiads in his 10^th grade. “It was just a random thing that I found I could do, during the pandemic lockdowns”, says the youngster who has invested over 10 hours every day for the last four years, honing his skills in international programming competitions online. He won the silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI-2024), held at Alexandria, Egypt in September this year. He had earlier won the bronze at Hungary’s IOI-2023 and Gold medal in this year’s Asia Pacific Informatics Olympiad (APIO-2024), an online competition hosted by China in which 35 countries from the Asia Pacific region participated.

“I have always been more inclined towards algorithms. Writing efficient code is what I specialize in and I enjoy doing it. In the Olympiad, three problems that require some kind of special algorithm or data structure are presented, to be solved in five hours. While the problem statements are in a fictional setting, the story line blends into the real world, with nuanced research-focused topics. It is very interesting because what matters is not writing code that works, but code that runs efficiently and cuts down computation time”.

The International Olympiad in Informatics is one of the most prestigious global competitions at school-level for algorithmic problem-solving and programming and brings together the brightest young minds, with 350 participants from 96 nations. Earning the silver medal at Alexandria puts Sushil in the top 15% of the world’s best competitors. “The interesting part at the Alexandria contest was that we were assigned a cool Egyptian team guide, a student of the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT) who kept mispronouncing our names. That notwithstanding, we had a lot of fun”, he adds.

An unusual Olympiad admission channel into IIIT Hyderabad
A first year B. Tech computer science engineering student at IIITH, Sushil explains, “I actually made it into IIITH through the Olympiad category. There are multiple categories of admission and since I represented the country, I was able to get my choice of B. Tech CSE. I was always among the top of my class but I was in a huge dilemma in the 10th and 11^th grade because I either had to pick Olympiad practice or prepare for JEE. It was a very difficult choice to make. My parents gave me a free hand and didn’t push me, either to practice or study. I would wrap up my school work and spent all my time in preparing for the Olympiad, which was my main focus”.

About his IIIT Hyderabad experience, Sushil admits, “To prepare for the Alexandria Olympiad, I needed three weeks of leave.  In general, if you take off for three weeks, you would have to repeat the semester. I am thankful to the Dean for helping me by approving my leave. When I returned to campus, I was really thrilled that Prof. P J Narayanan and the Dean congratulated me on my achievement.”

Life on campus
“Before coming to IIITH, I had read several reviews about the hectic student life on campus. But now that I live here, I see a lot of events being organized and receive almost 15 emails daily about programs that I barely participate in “, he confesses.  “Student life is pretty good, if you can manage your academics properly. The nice thing is that even though the mid-semester exams started a couple of weeks after I returned from Egypt, it went off well for me. I was able to juggle my academic work, thanks to the free hand given to me by the Institute. It’s been super fun here and I am glad that I have a good set of friends, who I hang out with. The visits to the go-karting course and the eateries nearby are especially memorable”.

The next competition on Sushil’s radar is the ICPC, an International Collegiate Programming Contest, requiring a three-member team.  “Our professors are very helpful and very easy to connect with and I am looking forward to their guidance to help us through the ICPC procedures”, says the first year student who hopes to join the Institute’s Programming club in the future.

Sushil has this bit of advice for anyone getting into competitive programming. “Practice, be very persistent with your goals and don’t give up. There are many free resources and many online programming competitions on websites like Codeforces and CodeChef, that I found most enjoyable to participate in”.

A self-starter from age six
Sushil was punching way above his weight from a very early age.  “I was six years old and in 1^st Grade when I started coding”, says the programmer who was born and brought up in Chennai by parents who are software engineers. “That’s also a reason why I am particularly interested in this field.  My mom works at Fujitsu and my father is ex-IBM and now a freelance consultant. It was my father who inspired me to start coding at a very young age.  I still remember sitting with him when I was in the first grade and learning HTML. He would lend his laptop to me so that I could just play around with code. Finally, I got my own laptop during the lockdown”, he smiles. “In general, Dad always pushes me to achieve something higher than what I could do, which I believe is a good mentality to have”. Sushil also credits his teachers at Budding Minds International school with motivating him on his journey. “When I told my chemistry teacher that I got selected for the Indian Olympiad team, I think he was happier than me!”

“Coding was always my hobby and I have never sought out another hobby except for Chess. I used to play chess competitively as a child growing up in Chennai, a city that has produced many chess prodigies.  I am federated, with a FIDE rating of 1527. It may not be a big number but it’s something.  A nice fun fact is that I played Gukesh Gommiraju twice over the board in real life. So that’s my biggest flex in chess”, grins the youngster for whom motivation comes from competing in online programming contests, with ratings being his benchmark indicator of performance. “The highest title that I achieved on Codeforces is Grandmaster, that few people have actually achieved”.

Genetically speaking, there are supposedly two types of personalities when it comes to sleeping schedules – the early morning lark and the late sleeping night-owl. Sushil originally pegged himself as a lark but now his deadlines are too chaotic to have a set routine.

While Sushil has spent too little time on campus to have formed any lasting memories, one endearing moment that stands out is when his friends gave him a surprise party when he returned triumphant from the September Olympiad. “When I came back to campus, I went to my friend’s room and we were chatting about my experience, when a group of my friends stormed in with a cake and there was general merriment.  I had not seen that coming!” he exclaims.

What next?  “Right now I am just thinking about ICPC because I enjoy competing a lot. We’ve already formed a team of three and we’ve been practicing”, says the home bird who likes nothing more than being left to his own devices.