Congratulations to Giang Tran on being named Co-op Student of the Year for Arts! The awards recognize Waterloo co-op students whose work terms exemplify innovation and impact.
Tran's advertising design lit up New York City's Times Square during her co-op work term as a product and visual designer at Rootly AI Labs. The third-year Global Business and Digital Arts student created custom workflows that saved the company's three-person marketing team about half of their asset creation time.
“Since they were giving me a lot of ownership, I was able to shine and have a lot of creative space to execute my ideas,” Tran says. “Being able to discuss these ideas with people in the office every day created an incredible environment for me to grow as an individual and as a collaborator.”
Despite it being her first co-op term, the team at Rootly saw Tran as an equal partner. She designed more than 80 high-impact user experience improvements, supported more than 1,000 on-call engineers with her artificial intelligence (AI) templates and helped bring in $70,000 in revenue. Tran also worked with leadership to define brand guidelines and shape Rootly AI Labs' visual identity.
“I moved from Vietnam to Canada at the age of 16, all by myself, to chase bigger opportunities in art and design. During this time, I've tried to see how my art can have an impact across as many people and as many communities as possible.”
Tran’s goal for the future is to design platforms that make people feel capable and creative to do their best work every day.