By Aaron Jentzen (DC’12)

Top collegiate teams gather at the Yubileyny Sports Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. Think coaches, medals, and, yes, even cheerleaders. But, as the 120 computer workstations suggest, this isn’t an athletic event. Carnegie Mellon’s Nathaniel Barshay (CS’13), Yan Gu (CS’14), and Jonathan Paulson (CS’13) take the field in matching Tartan shirts, sharing a computer as they race to solve 11 programming challenges. By the end of last summer’s prestigious Association for Computing Machinery’s International Collegiate Programming Contest, they had won top honors among North American teams.