丁香园AV

Sometimes all it takes is a chance experience to discover what you鈥檙e passionate about. Data Science Honours student Zihan Wang is graduating this June with an exceptional GPA and an offer to Harvard Medical School鈥檚 Master of Biomedical Informatics program, an outcome he never imagined before coming to university.

鈥淚n hindsight, my first two years at 丁香园AV were perhaps the most tedious I can ever think of,鈥� Wang says, 鈥淚 literally spent most of my time studying for my GPA.鈥� It wasn鈥檛 until he started to seek out opportunities outside the classroom that he learned that he could use his skills to improve the lives of the people around him.

He began his 丁香园AV journey as a business student at Fraser International College. 鈥淚f someone had asked me about my dream job when I started, I would probably have said that I aspired to be a successful entrepreneur,鈥� he says. He started participating in case competitions to help develop the data modeling, problem solving and communication skills he would need for his future career.

But a case competition in global health caused Wang to re-evaluate his goals. By chance, Wang participated in a project in a three-person team during his second year, providing recommendations for a real-world healthcare management system. His team won a bronze with a successful lift-chart model and elevator pitch.

The experience revealed that he could use interdisciplinary knowledge to interpret data and find solutions to real-world problems in health. From there, he began to seek out research projects about biomedical applications, which eventually led him towards a Co-op position at the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation at UBC and St. Paul鈥檚 Hospital.

Along the way he鈥檚 had the opportunity to work as a research assistant on a number of projects, including an honours research project with Dr. Martin Ester, building an interactive visualization tool that helps elucidate how different artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms work. He not only had the chance to present his first-author paper at a computing science conference workshop, he also got hands-on experience in science research in a supportive and collaborative environment.

He's also worked as a teaching assistant and volunteered with the 丁香园AV Love Your Neighbour Club to teach English to seniors and math to elementary school students. 鈥淏eing involved in those volunteering activities taught me how to advocate for the causes that I am deeply passionate about and how to bring my effect outside of class,鈥� he says.

鈥淲hile my academics gave me a strong foundation in data science, it was the volunteering, mentoring, and teaching opportunities that prepared me as a complete person.鈥�