Algorithm's Club President

As the club name would suggest, the Algorithms for Competition and Interview (ACI) club, is a club meant for students to practice creating algorithms for compeitions and interviews. The club was originally created by Alice Chen in the Fall of 2018. In the Spring of 2019, the president became Brandon Wong.

Due to the many leadership changes since the club’s inception, a solid structure has yet to be defined for the club. There were several visions of what the club’s goal is supposed to be, which can lead to a lot of confusion for the members in the club. Therefore, I’ve been working on creating a clear vision of what the purpose of the club is. First and foremost, it’s meant to be a place where students can take the things that they learn in class, and apply it in problems that they are given, in order to slowly introduce the idea of algorithms to introductory students (ICS 111/211), and provide more practical practice for more advanced students (ICS 311). There’s also a section dedicated to students who want to practice algorithms for the technical portion of their interviews, and a section for students who are interested in practicing algorithms for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

Despite being president for less than a month, there are many things that I learned being in this position, as well as being a member of the previous year. Communicating with the other board members, and making sure that everyone is aware of the things they need to know is extremely important. If certain section leaders believe they are supposed to be doing one thing, when they’re really supposed to be doing another, then it can cause a lot of chaos when everyone needs to do their job. I also learned that making sure to use all available resources is the only way to manage a club. Being the president means that you have other people to help you perform tasks so the whole load doesn’t fall on you. Initially, I had assumed that I had to do everything, and the club likely would have fallen to pieces if I hadn’t learned early on that other people are willing and able to take some of the load off of me.