Chan Nhu Pham Nguyen

Soleil Pham is a student based in Vietnam. 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 my 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 my school. She currently serves as President at Unity Compact. 

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.

In the future, she sees herself continuing to run, draw and code. In the long run, she 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.