Five Stetson University students, all members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), placed at the second annual regional programming competition held late February at Deloitte, a company that provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services.

Divided into two teams, Stetson’s first team named Null Pointer Exception, with team members Kathryn Sarullo, Joshua Letcher and Shayne Fitzgerald, placed fifth out of 50 teams in the competition. They brought home prizes and the opportunity to interview for internships with Deloitte.

Stetson’s second team named Mad Hatters, pictured on front page of Stetson Today, with team members Christopher Brackett and Michael Fye, placed fifteenth out of 50 teams total.

Members of the ACM hold weekly meetings to practice for competitions similar to the recent one at Deloitte. “When the competition begins, the prompters hand out a set of logical problems that students need to then write computer programs to solve each problem,” Sarullo said. “The judges have a set of unit tests that will test our program in every aspect, and we are scored based on the number of attempts and execution time.”

“Programming competitions are a great environment for students to practice problem-solving under pressure,” said Joshua Eckroth, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science at Stetson, and ACM’s faculty advisor. “These competitions are similar to software developer job interviews and reinforce the strong sense of community enjoyed by our students.”

Competitive programming is recognized and supported by several Fortune 500 companies, as this is a component of the interview process for most programming positions.

Currently Stetson’s ACM is practicing for the next programming competition on April 2, to be held in Virginia at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2016 Southeast Conference. They are also preparing to compete in next year’s ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), sponsored by IBM.

For more information about Stetson’s Association for Computing Machinery, contact Eckroth at [email protected].

By Kathryn Sarullo ‘18