To foster students’ creativity and capability, we also organize a wide range of extracurricular academic activities. Many students take an active part in the planning, organization and participation of the activities.

1. Student Research Training (SRT)

Established in 2000, the SRT program helps students get research experience and develop research interests at an early stage of their undergraduate program. Each semester, faculty members select topics from their research projects and call undergraduate students for participation in the projects. The selected students join the research group and work under the supervision of the advisors. During 2012-2016, more than 355 undergraduate students worked on over 297 SRT projects. Three of them won the First Place Awards of Tsinghua SRT program, and two projects won the Second Place Award. The students have greatly benefited from SRT and many of them continue the SRT research in their graduate study.

2. International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM/ICPC)

ACM/ICPC provides an open environment for talented students to further explore their research and practice capabilities. Tsinghua students started to participate in the ACM/ICPC contest in 1997 and since then have qualified for the final contest every year. Teams from Tsinghua have twice ranked 2nd place, and have won gold medals four times in the ICPC World Finals.

3. “The Challenge Cup”

“The Challenge Cup” is a contest of extracurricular work of science and technology for all undergraduate students nationwide. It was originated by Tsinghua University in 1989, and it has been organized every two years since its inception. In Tsinghua, a corresponding university-wide contest is held annually. Students work with innovative ideas, and application values are awarded and exhibited for technology transferring. Our students have won the Challenge Cup six times, making our department the most successful among all the schools and departments in Tsinghua.

4. Tsinghua Artificial Intelligence Programming Contest

This contest requires participants to develop AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs for playing games in a machine-machine manner. This contest is organized by the Student Association of Science and Technology. Many students participate actively in the planning and operation, game design, platform development, and technical support for the contest. From the 10th contest in 2006, it started to attract students from other universities for participation.

5. Beijing-Hsinchu Tsinghua Students Programming Contest

The two campuses of Tsinghua University at Beijing and Hsinchu, Taiwan initiated this programming contest in 1997. In 2006, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology began to join the contest. Since then, the three universities host the contest in turn each year.

6. Student Cluster Competition

The Student Cluster Competition is a series of international events for undergraduate students to practice supercomputing technologies. Competing teams are required to run different kinds of scientific applications on server clusters and get performance as high as possible with respect to certain power consumption restrictions. Our team has competed in the series since 2008, and won three champion titles in ASC, ISC and SC events simultaneously in 2015.