Let me first introduce myself on this blog.

My name is Andrey Terekhov and I work at Microsoft’s Central & Eastern European Headquarters. My main responsibility is coordinating Microsoft’s Academic programs in the region and one of the most exciting programs we have is the Imagine Cup.

My personal experience with Imagine Cup goes a long way back. This is the seventh year of the Imagine Cup and I am one of the very few people in the world that has attended all of the Imagine Cup worldwide finals so far. In fact, my first encounter with the event happened even before I started working for Microsoft. It was 2003 and I was still a lecturer at my “alma mater”, St. Petersburg State University in Russia. The very first Imagine Cup final took place at same time as the TechEd Europe conference in Barcelona, Spain, which I attended, and one of my future Microsoft colleagues invited me to hop over and visit it. Actually, I went mostly to support the Russian students who were competing. It was a very small and private event, with only a handful of teams and just one category - Software Design.

Well, the Imagine Cup has grown quite a bit since then! This year, more than 300,000 students have registered to participate in Imagine Cup, and a few hundred of them have made it through to the worldwide finals in Cairo where they will be competing for prizes in nine different categories and a few additional special awards.

Since my job is primarily focused on Central & Eastern Europe, I would like to say a few words about the region and its involvement with Imagine Cup. According to UNESCO data, there are more than 20 million university students in Central & Eastern Europe. Typically, Eastern European students are well educated in technical sciences, very competitive and thus many of them are successfully participating in Imagine Cup. Over the years, Eastern European students have received so many awards at Imagine Cup that the complete list would require several pages and a very small font size.

Team Red Devils from Russia who won the Project Hoshimi competition last year.

• In 2005, Russian students won the Software Design competition and received the Imagine Cup trophy
• In 2006, Polish students won all three medals in the Algorithm category
• In 2007, Polish teams captured 1^st place in three different categories (Algorithm, Photography and Short Film)
• In 2008, students from Central & Eastern Europe won 14 different prizes at the worldwide final

This year at the Imagine Cup worldwide final in Egypt, Central & Eastern Europe will be represented by nearly 100 students from 16 different countries. In the few remaining weeks before the Imagine Cup final competition judging, we will introduce some of the Eastern European student finalists and their projects on this blog, so keep checking back! In the meantime, let me wish good luck to all Imagine Cup finalists. See you in Cairo!

Roman Koshlyak from Ukraine who won the Algorithm competition last year.

Andrey Terekhov