That looks awesome. Passed it along to some folks at NYU. I wish _I_ could join. Surely they don't have so much demand they'd need to restrict this to high school and university students... In general if they're willing to do these programs why not provide training/re-training for adults in need of work?

To take part in the competition parts you need to be a student, but everyone can use the "learning system", and from what I've heard that includes all the same exercises and tasks.

And it's a lot of fun to learn a technology that shares almost no common ancestry with the Unix boxes most of us use today.

Oh good call, thank you. Signed up.

I placed highly in this competition two years running while in college myself. It was highly informative and I would recommend it to anyone else in a similar position.

We had a mainframe class at university from two older IBM employees. Was very interesting.