Students from Coastal Carolina University's Department of Computer Science placed in the top 35 out of 77 Southeastern college and university teams competing in the 2001 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Southeast USA Collegiate Programming Contest, sponsored by IBM. Coastal placed third, fourth and ninth in its division (universities without a computer science graduate program) and 16th, 22nd and 35th overall. The event was recently held at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville.

Coastal computer science majors who participated in the event were: Daniel Spivey of Loris, Ryan Karetas of Myrtle Beach, Chris Davies of Conway, Levi Bailey of Conway, Chika Ekeji of Nigeria, Tayfun Karadeniz of Germany, Michael Wisner of Myrtle Beach, John Wu of Myrtle Beach and Marcus Wu of Myrtle Beach.

"It is an exciting and valuable experience for our students to participate in this prestigious programming competition," said Abdallah Haddad, director of Coastal's Academic Center and Coastal's team coach for the event. "The competing students represent top-quality computer science students from across the southeastern region. Our students were up to the challenge." Haddad is also a part-time instructor of computer science.

This is the third year Coastal participated in the event. Last year, Coastal placed eighth and ninth in its division and 29th and 30th overall. The contest draws students from institutions from throughout South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.