Where should I study to be a medical computer programmer?

What is it like to be a computer science Olympiad student during school time (competitive programmer) and now study at Carnegie Mellon University?

• Answer:

  I wasn't a Computer Science Olympiad competitor, but I was involved in many computer science, science, and math competitions back in my high school days and always performed incredibly well in them. And then I did end up at Carnegie Mellon for a Master's Degree so I feel I'm qualified to answer this question. When you were in elementary school, you may have been at the top of your class, no questions asked. You were always the first one finished with assignments and you always got a perfect score. The teacher might have used your papers as the answer keys. You did all the work for group projects yourself because you could and you knew you'd do the work better than anyone else they set you up with. It's unfair and it annoyed you every time it happened, and it taught you that that's what you had to do to maintain your grades - do everything yourself. You might have been picked on or harassed by other students who were insecure about themselves. You often got frustrated that everyone else was so much slower and you felt like you were held back. Then as you got into high school, you started getting involved in Honors and AP classes, and hanging out with progressively more capable people, as those were the top people from all the elementary schools in the area - so now the cream of the crop are more concentrated. Then maybe you get into a top-notch college, where you're surrounded by people who were the tops in their Honors and AP classes. What you learn from participating in all kinds of high-powered competitions and from attending a top university like CMU is that while you in your everyday life you may feel like you're immersed in a sea of mediocrity and averageness (look around you next time you're driving on the road), there are a lot of really cool highly-intelligent intellectually-powerful people out there just like yourself, even if there are only certain places in the world where they seem to congregate. You can go from being the smartest person in the room to the dumbest REALLY quickly depending on your surroundings. This might be the first time in your life that you actually had to work to get good grades because everything else was so easy before. You realize that even if you're not the smartest person in the room anymore, which can be humbling, you're still a winner just for being there, and these are people with complementary skillsets that you can count on, depend on, and learn from, and vice versa. They're interested in learning and you know you'll all be successful in life. While in elementary school you were all supposed to be learning the same things (basic math and reading/writing), now the people around you have many different backgrounds, from biology to civil engineering to teaching to consulting to computer programming to research. You don't have to do everything yourself anymore and collaboration becomes a lot more bearable. You know if you invite 3 of these people out to dinner, your table will have a combined IQ north of 600. And it's awesome because you finally feel like you found somewhere that you fit in. But those cool people who are doing cool things always end up somewhere and it's awesome (and important) to maintain connections with your peers... and to show up at CMU reunions!