“CFA has provided me with many opportunities to explore what I’m passionate about, as well as work with many brilliant instructors and classmates. I’m forever grateful to this wonderful program for teaching me not only coding skills, but also real-world job skills. I would like to give a big thank you to everyone who has helped me throughout my time in this program!” – Winnie Tran
Winnie Tran is an accomplished Computing for All (CFA) student who is completing Level 6 in the Pre-Apprenticeship program this spring. She came to CFA via the Seattle Youth Employment Program (SYEP). Winnie became interested in coding while participating in an Upward Bound program where she enjoyed creating a website with a team of peers in their Intro to HTML/CSS class. Later on, in college she worked in hospitals as part of her program and decided to pursue a career in the healthcare field. Her family is low income, so she was able to receive scholarships and a work-study job that enabled her to graduate with both a Bachelor of Science in Medical Laboratory Science and a Microbiology BS degree from the University of Washington in the spring of 2022! Winnie is a well-rounded individual who has also studied philosophy and the arts.
Winnie’s grandparents escaped from China to Vietnam during the cultural revolution, so her parents were born in Vietnam. Slowly over time through a circuitous route via Canada and the US, both of Winnie’s parents immigrated to the United States and settled in Seattle where Winnie grew up.
Winnie came to Computing for All to learn to code so she could solve a problem that she saw during her college program rotations through different hospitals. At many of the hospitals she worked, she noticed that their Laboratory
Information Systems (LIS) were inefficient and had very steep learning curves; people had to train for quite a while before being able to use them proficiently. Some of the systems she has worked with only had a black screen with white text and required manually entering in critical information, leaving a lot of room for mistakes that could potentially be avoided through better software design.
Winnie’s goal in studying with CFA is to learn ways to design intuitive and accessible software that will streamline the LIS process into something accurate and easy for anyone to use. Working on personal software projects that will make her own and other people’s lives easier is an ambition of hers as well. There are many things technology can do to aid with everyday tasks and ease stress, and she is interested in exploring those kinds of projects. Winnie has enjoyed working with CFA. Her favorite experience is writing a string of code and seeing that it works! She
also enjoys troubleshooting an error and working through the bug unƟl it’s fixed. She really appreciates how patient
CFA instructors are with students. She says instructors explain things thoroughly when learning new concepts, patiently answer all of her questions, and help students to fix bugs. The variety of web projects and exercises she is doing with CFA is helping her to expand her skills and abilities through hands-on practice. In Level 6 Winnie is starting to learn more of the back-end code, like working with APIs and node.js, that will help her build innovative projects. She has only built websites so far but looks forward to the challenge of working on her own health data software projects. Winnie plans to continue to study coding even after she graduates from CFA as it’s a
very rewarding experience and will help her achieve her goals. Her message to anyone looking to go into tech and coding is to explore all the different options that this field has to offer and see what gives you that spark of joy!