A Tuscarawas Central Catholic (TCC) High School senior has received a $40,000 college scholarship from Amazon because of his high-tech thoughts on solving a low-tech problem.
“When I applied for the scholarship, I had to answer something like five essay questions,” Julio Sica-Perez said. “The one I remember best asked, ‘If you had the opportunity to work at Amazon, what would you create?’ I came up with some thoughts on a system which would guide drivers to available parking spots on a city street or in a large parking lot.
“I thought of my own family’s experiences trying to go to a restaurant or a shop and of people trying to get to my family’s convenience store on a busy day and felt this would be something that would be of use to anybody at any time.”
Sica-Perez attends TCC in New Philadelphia in the morning and the Buckeye Career Center in the same community in the afternoon. He said he applied for the scholarship in January in large part because of encouragement from his teacher at the center, Bill Alexander.
He is one of 400 students from 38 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and an Armed Forces base in Germany to earn the Amazon Future Engineer Scholarship. Seven of this year’s recipients are from Ohio, with Sica-Perez being the only one of the seven from outside the Columbus, Cleveland or Cincinnati metropolitan areas.
The scholarship pays $10,000 a year toward college expenses at the college of the student’s choice and includes a paid summer internship with Amazon after one year of college.
“Supporting underserved students in their computer science education is not only important to us – it’s imperative to building a diverse tech industry and future,” Amazon says on the section of its website devoted to the scholarships.
Sica-Perez will attend Ohio State University (OSU) in the fall and is one of 176 incoming students – two from each of Ohio’s 88 counties – receiving an OSU Land Grant Opportunity Scholarship that pays the full cost of attending the university. He said the OSU scholarship will enable him to bank the money from the Amazon scholarship and other awards, giving him a solid financial start for his future.
He also has received the Believe in Ohio STEM Innovation and Entrepreneurship Scholarship, Horatio Alger National Scholarship, Dr. G. James Pinchak Memorial Scholarship and Ray A. Kroc Award, giving him a total of $68,500 in scholarship funds, including the Amazon money, he can set aside.
He has taken the equivalent of a year’s worth of college courses at the Kent State University Tuscarawas campus and hopes he can graduate from OSU in three years.
“I definitely wanted to stay in-state for college because I knew my Kent State credits would transfer to any other state-related college in Ohio, plus I wanted to stay close to my family,” he said.
His father, Celestino Sica-Calel, came from Aguacatan, Guatemala to Ohio in 1995, with his mother, Santa Perez-Tun, arriving from the same community a few years later. They worked at the Gerber poultry processing plant in Kidron and Case Farms in Winesburg before opening their New Philadelphia store in 2013 to serve the growing Latino community in Tuscarawas and Holmes counties, many of whom also work in the poultry industry.
“We specialize in food and snacks from Central America and have diversified into clothing as well,” Sica-Perez said. “People come from all over to find things that aren’t available elsewhere.
“I’ve helped at the store for the last half-dozen years or so and continue to work there, mostly on weekends,” he said. “That’s where I first became interested in computers because I could see what they meant to the store.
“I learned about the Buckeye Career Center in my sophomore year at TCC and knew they offered training in culinary arts, marketing and computer technology. When it came time to pick a specialty, I decided to go with computers.
“At first, I didn’t understand as much as my classmates about them, but slowly I caught on.” Taking an online computer science course offered by Harvard University also helped, he said.
Sica-Perez received additional recognition in late April when he and career center classmates Christopher Ferguson and Xavier Pittman finished third among 10 contestants in a skills competition at the Business Professionals of America national convention in Anaheim, California.
“In two months, we put together a website called www.digitaltomatoes.net,” which can be found on the Internet. “It’s sort of like the Rotten Tomatoes site which rates movies, except it’s for video games,” Sica-Perez said.
“It’s a fun thing, but we also considered it as something investors might be interested in if it develops a large enough online community of people who want to know about new and upcoming games and what games are trending.
“The convention was great, not just because of the chance to go to California, but for the opportunity to meet other people from all over the country who share my interest in computer science.”
Sica-Perez also has played soccer for the New Philadelphia junior and senior high school teams for the past six years, most recently as a midfielder. He has two sisters – Shayla, 12, who will enter seventh grade at TCC in the fall, and Araceli, 7, who attends TCC Elementary School in Dover.
“Julio is an amazing student and an example to all his peers,” said TCC High principal Jennifer Calvo, who said he has a 3.8 grade-point average. “His classmates chose him as the speaker for the school’s commencement ceremony (on Sunday, June 4). I think it’s the first time there’s been a student speaker in that role, at least since I came to the school in 2009 as a teacher.
“I couldn’t think of a better model of a student who is dedicated to his faith, family and community than Julio,” she said. “One thing I’ll remember particularly about him is the drive he organized last June that sent three boxes of clothes to impoverished and abandoned children in Guatemala. He truly has a servant’s heart.”
The Sica-Perez family attends Dover St. Joseph Church, where Julio has been an altar server since fifth grade and more recently has been a lector.
“A Catholic education for me and my sisters has been important to my parents, no matter the cost or the amount of work they’ve needed to put in so we could have the best education,” he said.
“Being in an environment where I can talk about God and virtues, have access to the Bible and learn the teachings of Jesus has been tremendously helpful to me, especially when I realize these are things my public school friends can’t talk about in class.
“A lot of people think religion class is boring, but I’ve always found it pretty interesting. I like the way Pope Pius XII put it in one of his encyclicals (Humani Generis, written in 1950): ‘The truths that have to do with God and the relations between God and men completely surpass the sensible order.’
“Artificial intelligence is something everyone seems to be talking about now,” he said. “It really intrigues me because it has many potential uses, some of which may be dangerous. I want to use my knowledge of computer science to help find ways to use it for the good of people.”