DSU programming team advances to North American Championship

Dakota State University’s International Competitive Programming Competition (ICPC) team will compete at the North American Championship in May.

Nora Sandison, Dax Patel, and Joshua Ganschow will travel with coach Austin O’Brien

to Florida from May 23 to 28 to compete for the chance to move on to the International

Championship.

Coach O’Brien is incredibly proud of the team’s advance to the North American Championship.  He said it’s only their second team to ever do so..

Nora Sandison, a Master of Science in Computer Student and part of the teams said programming competitions include a big list of what are essentially math problems, and you have to write a program that can solve that problem given any arbitrary input.

O’Brien said the team is looking forward to competing in the championship against the best of the best. “This is an extremely high level and the team will  be competing against Stanford, Yale, and MIT, the elite computer science programs, so it’s incredibly fun to be able to point and say a small state school in South Dakota is competing at that level.