USACO First Contest: Perfect Scores & Direct Promotion to Silver — Congrats to them!

In the very first official USACO contest of the season, three students from Vinci delivered an outstanding performance:

🏆 Claire Liu

🏆 Benjamin Song

🏆 Sreehaas Balusu

All three earned perfect scores and advanced directly to the Silver Division 🎉

🔥 Why is this such a big deal?

USACO is one of the most prestigious and competitive algorithm contests for middle and high school students in the U.S. With the recent system updates, the first contest now features new problem styles and a much stricter filtering mechanism.

✔ It’s not just about solving problems

✔ It’s about producing correct and efficient algorithms under intense time pressure

✔ It tests logical thinking, coding precision, and mental resilience

Scoring a perfect score and moving straight to Silver places these students among a very small group of top performers nationwide.

💡 What we see is not luck, but long-term mastery:

✔ Solid foundations in data structures and algorithms

✔ The ability to break down problems and identify core logic

✔ Independent thinking with stable, accurate implementation

✔ Staying calm, focused, and mistake-free during competition

This is exactly what Vinci is committed to developing —

not “problem-solving machines,” but thoughtful, capable programmer-minded competitors.

🚀 Advancing is just the beginning

Silver is not the destination, but the gateway to a more advanced world of algorithms — deeper abstraction, more complex modeling, and higher standards for code quality. We believe that students who can achieve a perfect-score promotion in their first contest are the ones who will go far.

👏 Congratulations to Claire, Benjamin, and Sreehaas

💪 And encouragement to every student who is working hard and pushing forward