High school is finally over. These four years were a bit chaotic: I started with robotics and web development, spent one year going to almost every competition I could find, and ended up focusing most of my time on machine learning. I mainly want this article to be an archive of what happened and how my interests changed along the way.
9th grade (2022–2023)
I started high school as a programmer in the Peppers FTC robotics team. Early in 2023 we went to Bucharest for the regional phase of the FTC Romania Championship, where we won first place and the Innovation Award. A month later we returned for the national phase, won the Inspire Award and qualified for the FIRST World Championship in Houston. Going from a robotics club in Iasi to a world championship in the USA was absolutely surreal. We also won second place for the Motivate Award there, but the memories definitely outgrew the award.
After returning from Houston, I started working on Helix, an educational platform built around an issue I cared a lot about: the way computer science is taught. I took it to InfoEducatie, won the county phase and qualified for the national phase in Focsani. There, the five highest-ranked projects entered a 24-hour hackathon. I qualified and won first place, by quite a large margin! It was my first gold medal at a national olympiad and, just as importantly, my first real contact with the wider Romanian CS community.
It was a ridiculous first year of high school. I had gone to an international robotics championship, built one of my first serious projects and won a national olympiad. More than the results, this year showed me that programming could take me far beyond school and the usual competitive programming problems.
10th grade (2023–2024)
In November I started my first internship at an IT company with offices in my city. Working on real-world software was a very different experience from personal projects and olympiad tasks, and I learned a lot from it. At the same time, 10th grade became my year of trying pretty much everything.
The competition season started with FIICode, where I built a web app over a couple of months and got third place at the national phase. In February I went to Piatra-Neamt for the Informatics Olympiad for Teams, where my team won Bronze. Then, in March, I finally qualified for the National Olympiad in Informatics: top 90 out of roughly 1300 students in 10th grade. This had been a long-time goal of mine. At the national phase in Bucharest I placed 46th and won a Bronze Medal, which also meant I could be admitted to any computer science faculty in Romania.
Right afterward I went to Brasov for the Romanian CanSat and Rocketry Championship. I handled the embedded programming, which gave me an excuse to mess with Arduino boards, sensors and C. Then came the C# Olympiad in Slobozia, where I had five hours to build a Windows Forms app and somehow got another Bronze Medal. A lot of bronze that spring.
I finally broke the bronze curse at Infomatrix in Bucharest. Since I believe in recycling, I brought the same app from FIICode. The project which got third place in Romania now got a Gold Medal at an international competition! The last attempt was InfoEducatie, where that exact project was stopped at third place in the local phase. So the same app got third place nationally, gold internationally and third place in my own city. What a goofy world.
During the summer I moved away from web development and became hyper-focused on machine learning. I worked through courses and smaller projects almost every day, and one of them even got me a prize from Nvidia Romania. Out of everything I tried during 10th grade, this was the direction that stuck. Mathematics, computer science and a little bit of physics all met in the same field, and I felt that I had finally found what I wanted to seriously study.
11th grade (2024–2025)
The first few months were not that eventful. I entered the Constructor Open Cup because, at the time, I was considering Constructor University and it seemed like a good route toward early admission. I also qualified again for the National Olympiad in Informatics, this time in Ploiesti. I missed a Bronze Medal by around 40 points and the overall experience was not great, so I decided it was time to stop treating classical competitive programming as my main goal.
I also seriously tried Acadnet for the first time, in the computers section: GNU/Linux commands, operating-system architecture and shell scripting. I got first place in both the city and county phases and qualified for the national phase at UPB. I did not get a medal there, finishing somewhere around 16th, but I still had a great time. The embedded-systems workshop, UPB’s Formula Student team and the pop-quiz night were exactly the kind of side activities that make an olympiad memorable.
The actual focus of the year was competitive artificial intelligence. Romania organized its first national selection olympiad for IOAI, and I got first place in the county phase, qualified from the national phase, and then placed third at the selection camp. This put me in Romania’s first team for the second International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence. The organizers had to build an entire syllabus, online judge and collection of practice tasks almost from scratch, and I am extremely thankful to everyone who made it happen. The workshops were great, and the time Radu and Stefano spent discussing my questions meant a lot to me.
Before IOAI, we had three at-home tasks. For weeks I was spending up to 12 hours a day inside notebooks. The weather-prediction task took most of that time: I tried hyperparameter tuning, FiLM conditioning, ASPP modules, squeeze-and-excitation blocks, attention gates and pretty much anything else I could think of. It was insanely tiring, but also some of the most fun I had while preparing for any competition.
In August I went to Beijing for IOAI. China was clean, welcoming and unlike anywhere I had visited before. We stayed at a high school that felt the size of a university campus, visited the Summer Palace and, on the last day, went to a robotics conference where the technology completely blew my mind. I returned home with a Bronze Medal and one of the best experiences of my life.
Later that month I went once more to InfoEducatie and got third place in the web category. The hackathon theme was basically to rebuild AWS from scratch, with ten target microservices, and it felt more like a vibe-coding contest than a technical one. That experience finally convinced me to give up on web development as a direction. Much more importantly, I joined four other IOAI alumni to start the AI Community Contest, a series of Codeforces-like rounds for competitive AI. Giving something back to the community felt like the right way to end the year.
All results
The story matters more to me than the medal count, but for completeness, here is the full list of contests I attended during high school (and a few results from before it):
Show all contests ▼
2026
AI: 🥈 Silver Medal at the European Olympiad in AI (EUROAI)
AI: 🥇 Gold Medal at the Northern Eurasia Olympiad in AI (NEOAI)
AI: 🥉 Bronze Medal at the National Olympiad of Artificial Intelligence ROAI
2025
AI: 🥈 2nd place locally and 12th globally at the Cloudflight Coding Contest
Computer Science: 🥈 3rd place and Silver Medal at the InfoEducatie National Olympiad, web category
AI: 🥉 Bronze Medal at the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI), in Beijing
AI: 🥉 3rd place at the National Selection Camp for International AI Contests
AI: 🥇 2nd place and Gold Medal at the National Olympiad of Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science: ✅ Qualified to the national phase of Informatics Olympiad
Computer Science: ✅ Qualified to the national phase of Applied Informatics Olympiad "Acadnet", Linux section
2024
Computer Science: 🥇 Gold medal at the International Infomatrix Contest (web category)
Computer Science: 🥉 Bronze medal at the National Olympiad of Information Technology (C#)
Engineering: Third place at the Romanian CanSat and Rocketry Championship
Computer Science: 🥉 Bronze medal at the National Olympiad of Informatics (46th place out of ~1300)
Computer Science: Third place at the national phase of the FIICode contest, Web category
Computer Science: 🥉 Bronze medal at the national phase of Informatics Olympiad for Teams (IIOT)
2023
Computer Science: 🥇 First place and Gold Medal at the InfoEducatie National Olympiad in Romania
Computer Science: 🥇 First place at the city phase of the InfoEducatie Olympiad, qualified to the nationals
Engineering: 🥈 Motivate Award, 2nd place, at the FIRST World Championship in Houston, Texas, USA
Engineering: 🥈 Inspire Award, 2nd place, at the national Romanian Olympiad
Computer Science: 🏅 Ranked 110th in the national leaderboard at the Olympiad of Informatics
2022
Computer Science: 🎖️ Honourable Mention at Peppers++
Mathematics: 💯 Scored the maximum grade, 10.00, at the national exam in Romania
Engineering: 🤖 Joined the Peppers robotics club in Iasi as a programmer
2021
Physics: 🏅 163rd place in Romania in the Olympic's national ranking, my id is 23041
Computer Science: 🏅 86th place in Romania's Olympic national ranking, my id is IS_7_861
2020
Physics: 🎖️ Honourable Mention at the Olympiad
Computer Science: 🏅 105th place in Romania in the Olympic's national ranking
Computer Science: ✅ Attended "Urmasii lui Moisil"
Computer Science: 🏅 12th place at Infogim 2
Computer Science: 🏅 12th place at the finals of "Infogim"
Computer Science: ✅ Admitted at Center of Excellence in Programming 2020-2021
Computer Science: 🏅 27th place at Infogim 1
2019
Mathematics: 🥈 Second place at "Micii Matematicieni" in Harlau
Mathematics: 🏅 391st place in Romania in the Olympic's national ranking
Computer Science: ✅ Admitted at Center of Excellence in Programming 2019-2020
Computer Science: 🏅 4th place at Infogim 1
2018
Mathematics: 🥈 Second prize at "Myller"
Mathematics: 🎖️ Honourable Mention at "Mate3" in Suceava
Mathematics: ✅ Admitted at Center of Excellence in Mathematics 2018-2019
Next steps
In the autumn I will move to France and start studying mathematics and computer science at École Polytechnique. It feels like the natural continuation of everything I enjoyed during high school: strong mathematics, low-level computer science, machine learning, research and being surrounded by people who care deeply about what they build.
I do not know exactly which part of this I will end up pursuing. Maybe machine learning research, scientific computing, systems or something I have not discovered yet. Four years ago I thought I wanted to build web apps; since then I have worked on robots, satellites, olympiad problems, Linux systems and neural networks. If high school taught me anything, it is that changing direction is fine as long as I keep learning seriously.
For now, the next step is École Polytechnique. I am excited to see what I can build upon this foundation.