Humans of Blair: Grappling limbs, coding, and philosophical questions

Daniel Wu

Photo: Daniel Wu

Daniel Wu Photo courtesy of Gabe Marra-Perrault.

“It sucks you in. Once you start the wrestling season, it's so intense. During the wrestling season, it's basically your whole life. And so, I’ve really loved it… it’s totally floored me.”

Junior Daniel Wu joined Blair’s wrestling team his freshman year and since then has won multiple tournaments and even qualified for states his sophomore year. However, his grappling career did not begin at Blair. Wu started another grappling combat sport, judo, early in elementary school.

Wu attributes his interest in martial arts to his family, as multiple of his uncles and his father are devoted combat fighters. “My dad did judo as a kid. And so he's really into it. And he does BJJ, too… I have three serious wrestling uncles. They're all super into wrestling…and they come watch me wrestle too,” he says.

After joining wrestling his freshman year, Wu quickly realized that his experience with judo had translated well into wrestling. His last season, though, ended with a nail-biting moment, scraping through to the state championship. 

“I barely made it even to regionals, I scraped with a certain number of region qualifications. And then from there I lost in the first round of regionals and then I went all the way through the consolation bracket to get to third place,” Wu says. 

In the little free time he has, Wu captains the Montgomery Blair Computer Team. At each competition, the team is given multiple tasks and then has to write an improvised code that takes in inputs and writes an algorithm that returns correct outputs. Last year, the team even won first place at the Philadelphia Classic (PClassic), which took place at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Besides his father and family, people who inspire Wu are philosophers Peter Singer and William MacAskill, lead figures in the social movement Effective Altruism. The school of thought revolves around donating to effective charities and spending less money in life, something Wu has tried to apply in his own life. “This has made me change my thinking by trying to spend less money in my life, and consider taking action and donating to effective charities,” he says.