A passion for medicine and programing
Jamin Wu isn’t your typical medical student. Not only is he passionate about helping people, he is also very interested in programming and learning the theory behind it.
While reading about ‘A Programming Language’ (APL) during his Honours year, Jamin stumbled across the 2019 APL Problem Solving Competition. Having taught himself to program during university breaks, he decided to try his luck and register for the annual competition.
Run by Dyalog, the competition invites students from around the world to put their programming and problem-solving skills to the test by using any APL system to develop solutions for 10 short questions and a choice of 9 harder problem sets, varying in difficulty.
Fast-forward two months, Jamin was selected as the grand prize winner, receiving a cash prize of $2,500 USD and an invitation to present his winning work at Dyalog ’19 in Elsinore, Denmark.
Reflecting on the competition, Jamin says:
“The problems were very fun. It involved things like writing algorithms for simple ciphers, finding connected components for graphs, writing algorithms to estimate function integrals, and modelling a 2x2x2 Rubik's cube.I really enjoyed learning APL and how neatly it frames certain problems.”
In an era of digital health care, being technically proficient is becoming increasingly important. Jamin credits Monash’s Summer and Winter Vacation Research Scholarship program and staff from the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences and the Faculty of Information Technology for supporting his interest in programming.
“Monash is very lucky to have a number of wonderful staff with backgrounds in both medicine and computer science who have been great role models.
It’s also great to be surrounded by peers who have an interest in an array of areas such as music (Monash Medical Orchestra), theatre (Monash MedRevue), engineering (Monash Young Medtech Innovators) and lots more.”
Next month, Jamin will be heading to Denmark to visit Dyalog’s headquarters. He’ll have the opportunity to exchange experiences with other APL users, advance his technical knowledge through training and workshops and work with the Dyalog development team to influence the company’s future direction.
Jamin Wu