Bren:Alumni

The Bren School Alumni Chapter is proud of our alumni, and we are pleased to showcase their activities in these “Alumni Spotlights”. To suggest a spotlight please contact Eric Kowalik.

Bryan Nguyen ‘03, found his Bren School education provided him a great foundation that helped him not only in computer science, but in the legal profession too.

After graduating from the Bren School in 2003 Bryan Nguyen spent five years at Unisys as a programmer before facing a fork in the road of his career path.

“I could continue in technology and pursue an MBA and continue what I was doing or jump into a completely new field,” Nguyen said. “It was not necessarily better or worse, but something I always felt I had an itch for, something I wanted to explore since the law has such a direct effect on all of our lives.”

Nguyen, currently a law clerk at Freeman Freeman and Smiley in Irvine will be graduating in May 2009 with his Juris Doctor from Loyola Marymount University.

Despite changing careers, Nguyen said that his education in computer science provided him a great foundation for law or any other profession.

“The education at ICS really is a gateway to anything you want to do,” Nguyen said. “If you want to do law, if you want to do technology, if you want to do management or you want to go dance or do music, this is really a foundation, one path that can lead to a path of many.”

PLAYING CATCH UP

In high school, Nguyen didn’t know what computer science or programming was, but he had spent time writing programs on his graphing calculator and it had peaked his interested toward a career in technology.

When Nguyen was choosing colleges to attend, it was at the height of the dot-com boom and he wanted a place that would allow him to enrich his knowledge of technology but also provide him with valuable job skills.

“Did I want to follow everyone else who was going to UC Los Angeles or UC San Diego,” Nguyen said. “Or did I want to go a little bit off the main stream path and go down to Orange County and attend this promising program at UC Irvine.”

Initially Nguyen’s lack of prior knowledge of computer science made him feel overwhelmed, especially since some of his classmates already had dabbled in computer science and programming in high school.

“Everyone was talking about classes and object orientated programming and all the cool things you could do. I listened to these conversations and thought I was in way over my head,” Nguyen said. “If there was a starting line, I was behind it.”

Despite his early uncertainty the structure of the curriculum coupled with Nguyen’s hard work and assistance from faculty and academic counselors allowed him to succeed.

“The program was tough, but it was well structured because they started with the basics like what a function was and then growing it in complexity to a point where you could begin to understand how things work on a global scale,” Nguyen said.

The confidence he gained in the classroom inspired him to pursue on campus leadership opportunities and he eventually became president of the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a group that focuses on promoting computing.

“The ACM group was integral in acting as a bridge between students who were ignorant of the situation or didn’t necessarily know how to get where they wanted to go and the industry who needed bodies but just couldn’t get enough,” Nguyen said.

His involvement in ACM, particularly the work he did organizing the group’s annual career expo, impressed a recruiter from Unisys who offered him a job after graduation.

CURA PERSONALIS

Nguyen’s efforts in the classroom and as member of ACM prepared him well for his job at Unisys, but he was also cognizant of the fact that there was more to school than lab and assignments.

“You don’t want to go through the ICS program and four or five years later you look back and all you remember was I was in lab, I took midterms and finals and that was it.” Nguyen said. “You’ll have no real story to tell about your time there, it is important to have a balance.”

During his senior year, Nguyen enrolled in a dance class at the Anteater Recreation Center to expand his horizons, but also to address his lack of dancing knowledge.

“I was terrified at the thought of dancing, I was always self-conscious about going to weddings or events that required dancing and figured this was the time to fix that.” Nguyen said. “It was really fun and a great workout and you got an opportunity to interact with a lot of people.”

Nguyen enjoyed the experience so much that after graduating he pursued competitive dancing, attending private studios, taking lessons and competing in competitions.

Through his pursuit of competitive dancing, Nguyen has met other computer scientists and engineers, who like Nguyen, see a lot of similarities between dancing and programming.

“Dancing is very methodical, it is one step, followed by another step and so on,” Nguyen said. “You have to finish one step before you can do the next one and then you can loop back and start over, that sounds like programming.”

Even in dancing, computer science can provide you with skills you need for success.