Academic Profile of Trinh Bui
Trinh Bui is 18 years old and is in the second semester of her first year at Perimeter College. She was born in the USA but her parents are from Vietnam. Her overall academic self is confident and intelligent as she has put her studies first throughout her life. We are going to take a look at how her academic self has grown and developed through Trinh’s education and life experiences. Trinh’s academic self has been shaped by many things in her life, starting when she was young. She has always felt a great deal of pressure from her parents and environment to study hard and put her academic goals first. Her parents are quite traditional and they wanted her to go to medical school, but instead, she took inspiration from her uncles and decided that she wanted to pursue computer science or software engineering.
Thrin attended Catholic school from pre-k throughout high school. This also had a big impact on her academic self as she was taught from a young age to have a differing set of morals and values compared to children attending different schools like public schools for example. At this Catholic school students wore uniforms and said prayers. Thrin said this helped her in some ways because she did not have to worry about the daily struggle of finding an outfit but she disliked it in a way because students were not able to express their personality and individuality in the same way because of the enforced uniforms and strict dress code. Overall Thrin enjoyed her time at Catholic school. She was involved in many sports during her time there, these include volleyball, soccer, and tennis. Volleyball was her main and favorite sport. Because she played so many different sports they ended up having a big impact on her academics self. This was because they taught her the precious skill of time management. Thrin had practices almost every day and during this time she also had events such as games and matches on many of her weekends. This forced her to develop good schedules to balance all the things she had going on in order not to fall behind in her studies. During later years Trinh has been very happy that she was able to develop a sense of self-control and consistency so early on in her life because she found it very useful during her college career.
As mentioned before Trinh is in her first year at Perimeter College and has enjoyed her classes for the most part. Trinh explained to us how she considers herself lucky to avoid COVID during college because if she had needed to take classes virtually she might have delayed college for a semester or a year due to the situation COVID was causing. Hearing Trinh talking about this issue reminded me of one of the readings that we did during the first week by Melissa Azaric in the article COVID-Era College: Are students Satisfied? In this article, the author talks about how students often dread having to take classes online and feel like they are missing out on the college experience but also feel like their learning is suffering because of how covid affected their college experience. Students who had to take college courses during COVID did not get the chance to develop relationships and understandings with their professors. At the same time many professors, according to this article, felt like they were not able to do enough for their students. Vice President for Enrollment Audrey Smith said “Because there was so much activity in terms of the change in[residential] status, staff were behind,”. This was said in response to teachers being moved around, and administration and such being confused which led to people not being able to rely on staff to relay information, and often students and parents could not even get a hold of staff reliably. Trinh feels lucky that she was able to avoid all the stress that covid caused college students and is happy that she chose a school where students can take in-person classes.
One of Trinh’s future goals is to transfer to Georgia Tech after finishing two years at Perimeter. After that, she wants to pursue a bachelor’s or possibly a master’s in Computer Science or Software engineering. Besides her uncles inspiring her to follow this future career path, Thrin had a teacher in high school who taught computer science, and he helped her a lot. She refers to him as one of her mentors and inspirations because he was able to show her the joy and interesting parts of computer science and that prompted her to want to learn more and pursue it in her future. Many students can probably attest to how having a good or bad mentor, coach or teacher can completely influence how you view a certain subject or activity. Luckily for Thrin, her teacher inspired her to work hard and learn more about her subjects of interest. She has a deep interest and enjoyment for what she is studying and is a great example for college students around the world to take a look at their lives and ask themselves if they truly are inspired by what they are studying because if you are your academic self will truly thrive.