Aguascalientes, Ags. September 25, 2023.- As part of the various activities and competitions in which the School of Engineering of the Pan-American University of Engineering of Aguascalientes has participated, the School of Engineering of the University of Aguascalientes, Ags. Panamericana has participated in, the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is undoubtedly one of the competitions in which our students have received the most recognition.
This year, 2023, the initiative arose on the part of the students of the Faculty to form a "Pink Team": Arkanian Phoenix. They achieved an excellent result in the national qualifier, as they came in 55th place out of more than 320 teams that participated.
All the members of Arkanian Phoenix have previously participated in other editions of the ICPC nationals, but this is the first time that they formed a team composed of students Ariel Montserrat De la Cruz Sandoval, María Pachur Parás and Constanza Corvera Zambrana.
Members of Arkanian Phoenix
"My participation in programming competitions goes back to my high school years, when I participated in the Mexican Informatics Olympiad, and I was a bronze medalist in the European Girls' Olympiad in Informatics (EGOI)," says Ariel.
Constanza has participated in the Robotics and Astronomy Olympics and has also participated in the development of a video automation and audio recognition system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) along with other UP students.
Likewise, student Maria Pachur has the most experience with the ICPC contest, as this upcoming participation will be her fourth edition; it is worth mentioning that she was president of the competitive programming team of the ACM-W student association for 1 year, and currently works for the American company Lyft.
"It is a great honor for us to represent UP at the ICPC. [...] We want to be an example to follow, we hope not to be the first and last Pink Team of the university. This is one of many efforts we have made to promote the participation of women in STEM areas," they say.
It is important to mention that among the various efforts that the students of Engineering as well as the faculty itself have made is to participate in a social service project: the Beautiful Patterns winter camp, an MIT initiative in which our Panamericana takes part and whose purpose is to instruct girls in the basics of computational thinking.
