About Me

Howdy! My name is Christopher Tran, and I am currently a Junior at Texas A&M University. I am majoring in Computer Science as well as pursuing a minor in Business.

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas but, I have moved around to Richmond and Katy, Texas, both of which, are cities around Houston, Texas. My interests outside of coding and Computer Science include weight lifting, rock climbing, playing ultimate (frisbee), playing video games (mainly fps), eating good food, and giving back to my community. Some words that I would use to describe my personality would be hardworking, punctual, and dedicated.

I began coding back in high school when I took my first Computer Science course, AP Computer Science, in which I proceeded to drop out within two weeks because I did not think it was the career for me. Funnily enough, I dropped the course because the binary math and conversions we were doing I thought were too complicated for me as I had never been a math person and now I was doing math with only 1's and 0's.

Despite this setback, my sophomore year of high school, being older and more resilient, I decided to give AP Computer Science another go, and the rest was history. I still remember vividly running my first program, "Hello World", the cornerstone of any good computer scientist and coder. I believe what had excited me the most was that all my life I had never had exposure to computers, video game consoles, smartphones, or technology in general, and being able to have the computer do exactly what I asked it to do was revolutionary and mindblowing for 16 years old me.

The most beautiful aspect of Computer Science in my opinion is the ability to create a product with nothing but a computer and a keyboard. With other majors, I always saw how limited it was to have to be in a lab or working with job-specific hardware to create something or learn something new. With Computer Science I saw that the world was my oyster, all I had to do was use Google to learn about it and be dedicated enough to apply it. Computer Science is amazing in that anyone can create anything and that is why I love it so much.

Now, during my time at Texas A&M, I have had many chances to learn about all the dimensions that computer science has to offer. One of these opportunities has been TAMUHack, which is the University's biggest hackathon event in which they host every school year. These events have been a great opportunity to broaden my scope of the field of computer science and what it has to offer from seeing all the great projects that people can create. I also take part in the Philippine Student Association here on campus as it serves as my getaway from academics where I get to hang out, play sports, workout with, and volunteer with, my friends.

My first industry experience came from my time at L3Harris Technologies as a Software Engineer Co-op. Here, I was able to participate in the controller products agile development team and contribute to the awesome projects that they had going on. One of these projects was the creation of an RTP streamer/receiver that was utilized by a command/control software of a digital receiver to send audio via rtp over multicast. I created a web-based app that received RTP audio data and played it back through the web browser as well as I created the backend which sent the audio data using RTP over multicast. The opportunity to work with this company was amazing and I gained not only technical experience but also professional experience working on a team with real deliverables and deadlines.

In the Summer of 2021, I have the amazing opportunity to join Amazon as a Software Development Engineer Intern in Seattle, Washington (covid permitting) where I hope to diversify my experiences and continue to develop technically and professionally.