Hi Codeforces!
Last year, I went to an event called AddisCoder as a teaching assistant and it is being offered again this year! AddisCoder is a 4-week summer program to introduce high schoolers in Ethiopia to programming and algorithms. It was one of the most memorable events in my life because I got to know about another country, met brilliant students and teaching assistants that were super friendly and cool (and I also had lots of fun exploring Ethiopia with them). We TAs worked together to make problemsets for the students and helped them through the problems.
The students are very good. There will be about 170 students this year. Alumni have gone on to study at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, and many other institutions in the U.S., Ethiopia, Germany, and U.A.E. They have also gone on to work both as interns and full-time software engineers at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. A few alumni from the first offering of the course are now pursuing their PhDs in computer science or mathematics. (See the program website for program details and blurbs on some alumni). Students are hand-picked by the Ministry of Education to be the top in the country, chosen from every region (Ethiopia has > 100 million people). Some of the really passionate students also apply to the program themselves.
The co-organizer Jelani Nelson is a computer science professor with a research focus on algorithms who was influenced by platforms like Codeforces and Topcoder. So in his free time, he runs this program to make students interested in computer science.
So, I wanted the cool Codeforces community to apply for the 4th edition of this awesome event (2011, 2016, 2018 before) as a teaching assistant to provide both national and algorithmic diversity to the program. The program will run from July 22 to August 23. There is funding to cover full expenses (flight, lodging, etc) for all TAs. There is also stipend for a limited number of TAs.
If you're interested, check out http://www.addiscoder.com/#apply
Arash (Reyna)
Auto comment: topic has been updated by Reyna (previous revision, new revision, compare).
Why does it have to be during the IOI? Do you know if it is possible to participate not 4 weeks, but only 2 or 3?
I'll ask about why the dates were chosen this way. Last year, it was possible to attend a part of the event and since some weren't there for the whole event. Some of the TAs took off a week in between to visit other countries, or just attended an interval of the event. I assume it's gonna be the same this year, but I'll get back to you with the exact details later.
Awesome, thanks!
Hi kostka. I'm one of the organizers of the program.
It's actually a 5 week program (July 22 to August 23) for the TAs, not 4 ("week 0" is for some setup activities before the high schoolers show up).
It's unfortunate that we conflict with IOI, but we were very constrained in our choice of dates. Ethiopian high school kids get out later in the summer than Americans, and the Ethiopian college kids who expect to largely be interested in TA'ng start their summer breaks even later. So we pretty much had to run the program in some 5 week interval contained in July and August, and the one we picked was the only one that worked well with the lecturers' schedules.
In the TA application form there is a field to list your availability. So, we may take applicants who can't make the full program, but we definitely count full availability as a positive when deciding who to offer TA positions to. This is motivated by financial considerations: we have limited funding, and we'd rather fund someone who can contribute for 5 weeks than 2. In the last offering we had some TAs who funded their own flights and housing costs, so for them we didn't mind that they could only stay for a shorter time period (Ethiopian housing is pretty cheap by the way). If you're not looking for funding (you could mention that in the cover letter), then a short availability wouldn't count against you in the TA selection process.
Awesome, thanks for all answers! I even wanted to suggest such possibility, but it's good to know that someone already did this in the past. Thanks again.
bump!
Some applications are being reviewed now. Apply soon if you are interested!