Dani Tran

After advancing to ICDC, senior Danielle Tran poses with her DECA trophy. Tran is the president of the Cedar Park DECA chapter this year. “DECA, beyond the neon blue raves, serves as a gateway into business for anyone looking to improve their public speaking, management skills, marketing strategy, entrepreneurial knowledge or even social life,” Tran said. “You will come out a different person, and that’s coming from someone who used to have zero professionalism and spoke like a Discord mod.” Photo Courtesy of Dani Tran

If there is one person that has earned the title of ‘The Man’ from friends back in middle school and gone ahead and proven it over the last four years, it would be none other than senior Danielle Tran.

She’s done it all – president of Deca, ICDC winner, robotics member and former varsity athlete. All while maintaining her valedictorian status and becoming a published illustrator. 

To say that Tran is accomplished would be bordering on an insult. 

“I would not give myself that much credit for how well I balance everything, but with the time that I’m given, I try to dedicate it to mindfulness,” Tran said. “And not to be that person, but I lowkey love school, so I’m able to stay excited about it.”

Tran started her high school life in tennis, being able to walk on to the varsity team as a freshman and continuing through her sophomore year.

“I loved that team and every moment meant a lot to me,” Tran said. “It was the sweaty, core part of my underclassmen life. Even with the unnecessary grunt every time I served, tennis taught me a lot of personal lessons that paper and pencil couldn’t ever replicate.”

Tran chose to leave the tennis team for the sake of her health and putting more priority on her other academic interests that held more weight in her computer science interests.

“I continued building upon my interest in computer hardware through Arduino gadgets and coding, but I wanted to make better connections with the market and communicate such complex ideas,” Tran said. “I turned my focus more towards DECA and teaching myself about business. I became so unexpectedly motivated about a club I had originally joined to follow my friends into.”

Learning about the organization through her business classes, Tran has helped to earn seven chapter-wide awards, including growing the club and amount of competitors as a whole.

“DECA, beyond the neon blue raves, serves as a gateway into business for anyone looking to improve their public speaking, management skills, marketing strategy, entrepreneurial knowledge or even social life,” Tran said. “You will come out a different person, and that’s coming from someone who used to have zero professionalism and spoke like a Discord mod.”

Attending the State meets and the ICDC convention in Orlando last April gave Tran a leg up in her running for the opportunity to become the DECA chapter’s president for her senior year.

“This year, I’ve gotten to work with some brilliant people,” Tran said. “We fortunately got a small taste of everything up to this point, but this year, my goal was to inspire that same enthusiasm in a larger chunk of CPHS. The other officers and I cranked up on member recruitment, earning Century Chapter status for the first time ever. Pro tip: if you want a shot at becoming famous, post everything you do on Instagram. Our super viral post of 80 likes got us noticed by Cane’s somewhere along the way.”

In the fall, Tran will be attending the University of Texas at Austin as a member of the UT Cockrell School of Engineering. She will major in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Business management.

“Cockrell has been my dream for a while,” Tran said. “It certainly helps when your dad hands you a shirt that says “TEXAS Engineering” in big, blocky letters as tennis outerwear. As a Longhorn, I hope to explore more tech-powered business solutions and give a voice to the industry the same way that I could for myself and others in DECA. Some days, I’ll do that, and other days, I might hit the courts again.”

According to Tran, she isn’t the techiest person, but is eager to continue learning and growing using her experiences in business.

“I mean it when I say that I haven’t done anything particularly huge these past years,” Tran said. “It’s more like I dabbled in a lot of random interests, failing sometimes, succeeding some times, quitting some times. Most importantly, I’ve been very lucky throughout it all. My grandma, usually pointing at me with her ladle, will lecture about giving every option a glance— that way you can properly set your sights on the right path.”