Student of the Week: James Tran

During his four years at Niwot High, James Tran was always eager to accept a new challenge, from joining the knitting club, to heading up the Innovation Center's curriculum development team, to teaching himself website testing. Now that penchant for self-improvement is paying off in a big way. In April, Tran was one of 100 students from across the U.S. to be awarded the Amazon Future Engineer scholarship, worth $10,000 per year over the next four years.

"It's a really cool scholarship," Niwot High computer science teacher Teresa Ewing said of the program, now in its second year. Niwot student Rachael Triplett also received a 2020 AFE scholarship and is planning to study computer science at Colorado College. "It gives you Amazon internships every summer. And Amazon pays really crazy salaries for engineers."

The Amazon Future Engineer program targets high school seniors with a technical background who are planning to study a computer-related field in college, such as computer science or software engineering. While that description definitely fits Tran, he also hopes to bring another element into the precision world of engineering.

"I'm going to CU-Boulder, and I'm pursuing the Technology, Arts and Media program, with hopes of getting a better background in digital modeling or ui/ux or website design-those more visual or most artistic aspects of technology," he said. "I kind of want to merge art and technology together, because I like both of them, and I kind of want to see where it can go from there."

Tran discovered his artistic bent when, as a freshman, he joined Niwot's knitting club despite not knowing how to knit. Much to his surprise, he found the fiber arts "relaxing and pretty," which spurred him on to further artistic endeavors, most notably drawing.

It was the next year in Mrs. Ewing's class when Tran first realized that art and design could be deployed in the service of technical functionality.

"To lead us into the coding world, Mrs. Ewing had us program a lot of visuals," Tran said. "With the visuals, when we would learn a whole bunch of aspects of coding, it would be easier to understand because we could see it. I realized I really liked doing that visual aspect, and I really like coding visuals, and it just really came together."

Tran describes his aesthetic as "simple, organized, crisp and clean," elements he hopes to spread to even the most technically sophisticated websites.

"I've seen some websites before, and I probably shouldn't name them, that could use some work," he said. "You don't want a website to be confusing, because then why would a user want to spend money or take their time to actually figure it out. Not everybody wants to do that. As we progress through the future, we're going to have to be more simplified and cleaner, so not just some people can use certain websites, everybody can use them."

Website functionality has become one of Tran's specialties, thanks to his ongoing internship for Gunbarrel's Anark Corporation, which produces information management software for the technical industry. There, he has been tasked with automating test plans for their websites, another skill he had to scramble to learn. It's not exactly the visual work he hopes to do in the future, but, for Tran, there's no such thing as an unhelpful skill.

"When I came in I thought, 'How am I going to automate a test plan for this website? I know nothing about NodeJS or how to do testing'," he said. "But it turned out to be really simple. It was just writing a test like, 'How do I do this with a mouse and a keyboard?' I built my skills from there to understand how the website worked. Right now at the internship, I'm using JavaScript, but I'm actually using it to do some algorithms and some processes that aren't necessarily something that you see visually, It's very different, but I may as well get exposed to both of the apps, visual and behind the scenes, because websites need both."

Tran's internship came about through his work at St. Vrain's Innovation Center, which opened during his sophomore year. He started there as a volunteer for the VEX Robotics program and was eventually hired on as staff. During his junior year, he served as the lead of the curriculum development team, and helped develop technology lessons for elementary and middle school students.

"We went all around the district, and we actually worked with Sphero, Questbotics, and the Girl Scouts," he said. "I think the most gratifying part was seeing the kids learn something. Some of the kids thought that learning technology was basically playtime, and others were like, 'Oh wow, this is actually meaningful to me.' That is what I call success. Kids liking your lesson, but also learning something from it...I never had this opportunity when I was in elementary school, so seeing these kids having that opportunity and being willing to learn is so amazing to see."

During his limited free time, Tran was also active in Niwot's Interact Club, the high school arm of the International Rotary. Last fall, he spearheaded the "End Polio Now" coin drive, which raised more than $1,000 to help fight the spread of polio in Africa.

Tran is now patiently waiting out the summer before heading to Boulder in August. Though he is not entirely sure what his future will bring on the career front, he is eager to find his next new challenge.

"People who can decide what they want to do right away, and know what they're good at, I applaud them," Tran said. "There are a lot of ways to go when it comes to merging art and technology, and I have yet to find out what that means."