Computer Science

Nomination letter of our successful candidate for the All-USA Academic Team for 2003

12 February 2003

All-American Academic Team

Selection Committee

Re: Yuriy Senchenko– Recommendation

I am writing to you on behalf of one of my students, Yuriy Senchenko. Yuriy is a full-time student in the Computer Science program at Renton Technical College. I have had the pleasure of having Yuriy in several of my classes, including Office Applications, and Database Design and Programming classes. Yuriy has always been a straight “A” student in my classes, but my recommendation of him goes way beyond that simple fact. During the time that I have had him as a student, Yuriy has impressed me with his intelligence, his dedication, and his drive to learn and apply all that I, or this program, can give him.

I will start with the fact that in every class, Yuriy quickly grasps the concepts presented, and asks articulate questions that show me that his mind is racing ahead to how he can apply the concepts and techniques to real-life situations. He also quickly grasps the overlap between the classes he is taking, such as how programming principles and techniques he is learning in one class can be applied to the database he is building in another class. Yuriy is one of three students in my database course who approached me and said that they wanted to learn even more about databases than they were getting in class, and I set up and ran a special advanced class during lunchtime. Yuriy cheerfully gave up his lunch break to have the opportunity to learn more about a rigorous subject, and then was quick to apply his knowledge.

I always encourage students to seek out opportunities to apply what they learn in class, but Yuriy exceeded my wildest hopes in this area. He first volunteered to build a database for a non-profit organization which worked so well that it uncovered some internal fraud in that organization, and helped them to resolve the situation. Since then he has built three or four other databases for small businesses that he is acquainted with, all of which have been well received.

Yuriy is also working on campus as a Work-Study student, and has been assigned to the IS Department. One of their major projects has been to undertake an extensive inventory of every computer on the school campus. Their goal is to enter all of this information into a database, which can then be used to plan upgrades and acquisitions in the future. When it turned out that the results of the software program used to record the information from each computer was going to have to be re-entered into a database by hand, which would take weeks, I ventured that we should be able to write a custom software program to extract the data from the text files, rather than have it be manually re-entered. Once again, Yuriy rose to the occasion, taking my idea of how to approach the programming, and spending hours of his own time creating and testing the program!

I am recommending, in the strongest possible terms, that Yuriy be appointed to the All-American Academic Team. If I could only recommend one student, he would be the one that I recommended. I feel that he is a perfect example of just how much can be accomplished by a dedicated student in a two year college program. He will serve as a sterling representative of our program, and our school.

Please feel free to contact me at RTC, (425) 235-2352– Ext 5584, or by email, tculler@rtc.ctc.edu

Sincerely,

Timothy A. Culler, MBA-IS