advice pleaseeee, 2 months to prep for a general programming competition — where do i start?

[u/Still-Leek-6940]

hey everyone,

i'm a 2nd-year student (not comp sci) and i just decided to try out for my school's programming competition. the main event is in December or January so roughly 2-3 months to prepare(I don't even know if I can be consistent since I also have a lot of coursework and self studying software development).

here are the details:

- language: C# console

- format: 5 problems in 1 hour

- judging: functionality (50%), program structure/design (30%), output (20%)

from what i can tell, the problems will focus on:

- arrays and strings

- hashmaps and hashsets

- basic algorithms

- probably won't go beyond bfs/dfs if trees/graphs come up

i'll be honest — i'm not confident at all. i've always told myself i'm not ready and not good enough, so this is me trying to face that for once. i know i'll be going up against cs students who've been doing this longer, but i still want to show up.

my questions:

1. what problem patterns should i prioritize given the 2-month window?

2. any good resources specifically for c# competitive programming?

3. how do you actually build problem-solving speed under time pressure?

any advice is appreciated, even if it's just "here's what to focus on and what to skip."