IB graduate profile - Annette Truong

Graduated from Prince George Secondary School, Canada in 1992.

"I attended IB classes at the Prince George Secondary School in northern British Columbia. I graduated from PGSS with an IB diploma in 1992. Afterwards I took a year off to travel to California. During this year, I attended DeAnza College in Cupertino and studied martial arts.

After my year of rest and relaxation I seriously pursued my post secondary education as a computer science student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. During my first two years I lived at a soup kitchen where I helped feed the impoverished of Montreal to pay for my room and board. I also helped out with a children's club, AWANA.

In my third year I was chosen from among four candidates who applied to attend the University of New Mexico as a foreign exchange student. During my year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I met my future husband, Tuong, while taking a ballroom dancing class.

I returned to McGill in 1996 and took two more years to finish my degree. During this time, I worked at a community center teaching computer skills to children in an after school program. I also continued to work with children at AWANA.

I married Tuong in 1998 in New York (just blocks away from the World Trade Center). That same year I graduated from McGill with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science. For our honeymoon we went to the top of the World Trade Center, and then drove from Montreal to Prince George to Albuquerque, New Mexico - about 5,000 miles of driving. We spent six days hiking at Mount Robson (the tallest mountain in Canada) along the way.

In Albuquerque, I started my own business selling specialized craft kits on the Internet. We moved to California in 2000 where I was hired as a software engineer with Octopus.com, one of the dot-com companies during the Internet craze. I had my son, James, in October of 2000.

Soon after, Octopus folded but was then purchased by Ask Jeeves, an online search engine (http://www.ask.com). I currently work as a software engineer for Ask Jeeves in JeevesSolutions, their enterprise software division. I am a Javascript programmer, but I've also done XSLT programming and am starting with Java programming. My daughter Emily was born in June of 2002.

My spare time is packed with many extracurricular activities. I am a board member of a quilting guild, SCVQA. I created the SCVQA website in 2001/2002 (sample page: http://www.scvqa.org/scvqa/index_august.html) and I am currently their newsletter editor. I design and maintain several other websites as well: http://www.mariawerth.com (quilting website), http://www.geocities.com/foundationpapers (quilt patterns), http://www.tinykits.com (craft kits), http://www.geocities.com/annettetruong
(my resume). I also spend a lot of time doing digital photography; I recently hit the 5,000th photo mark on my digital camera. All this is in addition to looking after my children when they are not in daycare.

I am indebted to the education I received through the IB program. Because of my diploma, I was given 22 credits at McGill University (equivalent to more than seven classes). This allowed me to take a lighter course load and pursue many extracurricular activities. I learned to place a high value on volunteer work and community service, which has helped me be an active member of my community. Although it's been over ten years since I graduated from IB, the IB program was very influential to the successes I've enjoyed in my career, and set the standards of volunteerism that I uphold to this very day.

You can find a recent photo of me with my family at this site: http://www.geocities.com/truongphotos."