Chan Nhu Pham Nguyen

Soleil Pham is a student based in Vietnam who hopes to push forward game development as a tool to support education for kids and teenagers around the world. Starting from a young age, she developed a keen interest in computers and machines through her school’s robotic classes. Hence, she further explored this interest by taking an app development class in her freshman year of high school, AP Computer Science A as a sophomore, and founded her first club, Unity Impact, in junior year that aims to popularize game development and programming at her school. Recently, she also became co-leader for her school’s programming club and supported club members for competitive competitions such as USACO. 

To the side, she also participates in competitive sports, namely swimming and running. These activities help her realize the beauty of having a community and what it takes to lead and form it: preparation and communication. These two components are something she repeatedly considers and refers back to when leading her communities and hosting events. 

. Through her academics, extra-curricular, personal strengths, and achievements, she wishes to mitigate abuses of confidential information.

Growing up, she was pretty competitive in sports such as swimming and running. To help her win races, she would create a training schedule after her sports season ended and commit to it. As a result, she improved significantly and was faster than she was before. This taught her that success almost always comes after preparation.

From her middle school days, she was able to learn a bit about computers and machines through her robotic classes. These classes were so much fun, and they encouraged her to take an app development class in her freshman year of high school, AP Computer Science A as a sophomore, and created her first club, Unity Impact, that aims to popularize game development and coding at her school. She currently serves as club president of Unity Impact. 

Additionally, For her, an important global issue she would like to tackle is the abuse of confidential information. There are many things that can make it easy for hackers to access and abuse personal data, even if those things are easy to fix. For example, poor cyber hygiene can be solved by just implementing two-factor identification and VPN. However, the majority of people are unaware of ways to protect their cybersecurity, and ignorant of the severity of not keeping their data safe. She plans on raising awareness on this issue to hopefully decrease data breaching, while also intending to pursue further knowledge in this field.

In the future, she sees herself continuing to run, draw and code and hopefully do well in maintaining balance in life. In the long run, her ultimate goal is toshe aims to play a leading role in effectively combating cybersecurity and data privacy in order to protect breaching of personal data and ultimately safeguard the privacy of others, in a for-profit and not-for-profit manner.