Design competitions are an extremely common way to facilitate job placement for students. It filters out the uninterested, develops skills, and connects employers with first-time job seekers. It costs almost nothing and everyone benefits. The work product is often irrelevant.

See also: “Hackathon”

It's particularly insulting because no one could be bothered to come up with a useful, interesting problem description that is not loaded to the hilt with acronyms of systems that are only ever relevant to their current system:

> If the TFM strategy involves a GDP, AFP, or CTOP, FMDS allocates arrival slots for the constrained resource to NAS users and computes Expect Departure Clearance Times (EDCTs) for all included flights that are still on the ground.

While we are here... where on earth is the reference/demo data? How do they expect anyone to make a visualization going purely from verbose specs?

Aviation is loaded with these acronyms. It's their technical jargon.

Communicating lots of information in minimal time seems to be really important to them for some reason...

Here's some good resources for looking up acronyms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation,_avionics,_ae...

https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/airspace/tfm/glossary-o...

https://www.allacronyms.com/aviation/abbreviations

https://www.abbreviationfinder.org/

I worked on FAA systems for a while, mostly FDIO (Fight Data Input Output, aggravatingly pronounced Fido by controllers), where we couldn't even just refer to a monitor and keyboard as such, had to go and call them a RANK (Replaceable Alpha Numeric Keyboard) and CRT (in spite of them long since having moved away from Cathode Ray Tube technology)

Ha, I am not a controller but I have always called FDIO "Fido". Never heard of RANK or CRT though, probably to be expected since there are so many different systems in the NAS, each with its own unique terminology.