By Annie Phun
Editor in Chief
While many students struggle to balance having a part time job with maintaining a good academic standing and participating in extracurricular activities, senior Wynee Tran manages to juggle working two, one at Creamistry and another at Sun Dental.
At Creamistry, Tran serves customers ice cream made with liquid nitrogen, while at Sun Dental Care, she is a front desk assistant, working with patients to manage their insurance and file papers. She works at Creamistry on the weekend and Sun Dental on the weekdays.
“At first, it was really hard to have these jobs because I felt that I couldn’t take a break. I needed the money, so I worked seven-day weeks and stopped hanging out with my friends,” explained Tran. “But I realized that I was never going to get another chance at a high school experience, so I told myself that it was okay to take a break sometimes.”
Besides maintaining a rigorous course load and playing an integral role in ASB at school, Tran also volunteers at Keck Medicine of USC and plays open gym volleyball at Almansor Park. Time management is her biggest obstacle, but she still feels that the payoff of having two jobs is worth it.
While her job at Creamistry is simply something that allows her to generate spending money, Tran took the job at Sun Dental in efforts to explore her future.
“I do want to go into the medical field, but I don’t know which one yet,” stated Tran. “I felt that working at Sun Dental would build my resume and human capital.”
From working at Sun Dental, she has discovered that although she does not want to have a career in dentistry, a job in administrative work could be an option for her.
“I learned a lot of things such as how to speak proper Mandarin,” said Tran. “A lot of the patients I work with only speak Mandarin, and it was hard to interact with them because I was basically learning a whole new language with complex terminology.”
Although Tran sees no future in working at Creamistry, she has been offered a summer job with Sun Dental and her bosses have asked her to work between breaks when attending college.
“Watching Wynee work two jobs and keep up with everything else that she’s doing is really admirable,” stated senior Annie Tran, one of Wynee Tran’s best friends. “I can’t even imagine working one job, let alone two.”