Prodcast
On 4th Feb 2024, I invited Shubham for a podcast on my channel.
A brief introduction about Shubham Jain:
Shubham (aka TheOneYouWant) is one of my best friends I’ve met through CP. He started CP after taking a programming class at IITB, and soon became obsessed — he ended up qualifying for WF thrice! After graduating from IITB, he went to grad school at Stanford, and now works as a software developer at a quant firm in New York. He’s enjoyed teaching through his years; he used to teach for math olympiads through undergrad, and was head TA for algorithms in grad school. In his free time, Shubham likes to read manga, play badminton, and write blogs. Often, he’s thinking about the next random thing to get obsessed with…
The podcast was recorded with a live stream, with audience also asking the questions. It was my first experience hosting someone on a live stream. Despite some testing a day before, recording with OBS did not went smoothly.
During the recording at lot of times Shubham’s voice was not audible to the audience, but fortunately, zomm recording did had the audio. So once recording was over, I had to manually merge two videos (one online which had my voice, and zoom recording with his voice). Audience had to wait a lot for this post processing to get completed. It was my first experience editing a video.
Regarding the podcast, I enjoyed asking questions a lot, I asked him about his experience at ICPC World Finals, IIT Bombay hostel life, his experience at Stanford, and his work at Quant firm.
Chronologically, following were the questions that made final cut in the podcast.
00:00 - Introduction
01:50 - How did you manage to qualify for ICPC World Finals 3 times.
04:25 - What is your most memorable ICPC experience?
07:50 - How much maths is required for coding?
09:40 - What would be one advice you could give to a student who has never been part of a competitive peer environment like prestigious institutes have?
11:10 - Do you miss your IIT Bombay days?
12:25 - How much has an MS degree helped you after graduating from IITB? As in I would like to know about how much is the exposure to research in Stanford as compared to IITB. Also, could you please discuss about if the MS degree is favourable for your career as a quant.
14:55 - (Head) TA at stanford
16:45 - What do you do after work?
17:27 - Could you share some advice for higher studies application, specifically to high ranked CS courses in the United States?
18:15 - What is your daily routine?
19:45 - What do you do to keep yourself fit?
22:15 - How much challenging it was to qualify through North American regionals compared to Indian regionals?
25:20 - How to get referrals at Quant firms?
27:00 - Good resources to prepare for an upcoming quant internship?
29:05 - What should be the average rating on codeforces to breeze through regionals?
30:35 - What is the most essential skill required for the ICPC?
33:55 - Any valuable advise for the beginners and grandmasters?
36:50 - What happened to your race to IGM challenge? How to develop skill issue?
39:45 - How many times did you get to use advanced algorithms like FFT, HLD, generating functions, etc?
40:55 - Can you share some insights from your internship at EPFL? How was your experience living in Europe?
45:40 - Were you active in any clubs in college?
49:20 - Do you think exam structure outside India is better than Indian Institutes?
50:20 - Any comments on AI solving 3000+ rated codeforces problem?
51:10 - Do quant companies at IITs ask hard OA tests? Did you apply for any quant company when you were in IIT?
51:50 - What’s your favorite manga series?
52:15 - Thank You for joining today.