Meet our Students

1. What is your full name?
Thanh Ngoc Tat Nguyen.

2. What country do you come from?
I come from Vietnam.

3. What is your favorite place in Seattle?
My favorite place in Seattle (besides downtown) is the Frye Art Museum.

4. What do you enjoy most about Seattle Central?
SCCC is a really good college not only because of its friendly atmosphere, its proximity to downtown but also because of its wonderful High School Completion Program as well as College Bridge Program. Those programs help international students like me save a lot of time and money.

5. What are your plans for the future?
My plan for the future? This is my last quarter at SCCC. I'll transfer to DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond this fall to begin my training to be a game programmer in the future. Hopefully, after I get my BS Degree, I can work for Microsoft Game Studio or any game company in Seattle (The great thing is that there are hundreds of them here in Washington).

6. What are the biggest differences between life in your country and life in Seattle?
I found few differences between life in Seattle and that in my country. May be because I feel as if I were at home here: I go to school, go home, do homework and relax on the weekend. However, maybe life here is a bit more intensive than that in my country. And yet, I really enjoy that feeling.

7. What do you consider to be your biggest accomplishments? Why?
My biggest accomplishment so far is being accepted into DigiPen. It's also the first accomplishment in my long journey to enter the game industry (by the way, do you know that DigiPen is the only school in the world that has the BS degree in Game Programming? It's such a great school!! And I'll be there this fall. Imagine how wonderful it will be!).

8. What do you consider to be an interesting fact about you?
I would say that it is my two "contradictory" favorite subjects. I love art, particularly drawing and painting. And I have been learning painting for 10 years with a lot of teachers. I am pretty good at Vietnamese silk painting (and really proud that my teacher is the best silk-painting artist in Vietnam), oil painting and pen sketching. I have also learned about Chinese painting, which I think is a really wonderful type of painting. Although watercolor is not my favorite medium, I know the basic techniques and try it sometimes. Yet, I love mathematics as well. Personally, I think mathematics is such a great and essential subject that you could not live without it. Not only does it teach you functions, formulas and numbers, but also shapes for you a mathematical way of thinking and planning, which is very necessary to achieve success in your life. That's why I will learn to become a game programmer, not an artist. Actually, I consider a game programmer to be also an artist since you need creativity and a good skill in art/design to make video games, not just coding knowledge.

9. What are your hobbies?
Painting is certainly one of my hobbies. I also play basketball, table tennis and football (not American football, I'm too skinny to try that one).

10. What were you doing prior to coming to Seattle to study at Seattle Central?
Before I came to Seattle to study at SCCC, I was an 11th grade student at LeHongPhong High school in Vietnam.