Herriman High student Parker Fawcett is well on his way to a flourishing AI career. (Courtesy Fawcett)
Parker Fawcett isn’t waiting for a college degree to begin a career in technology. In fact, he isn’t even waiting for a high school diploma.
The Herriman High School junior has spent the past year building independent AI projects and, at 16, he works as an AI skills engineer at CHG Healthcare.
Fawcett began experimenting with open-source AI coding platforms like Open Code, building website chatbots. He also played with retrieval-augmented generation, training AI to search for relevant information in a set of documents.
After exploring that for a while, Fawcett started his flagship project, Skora, an AI program originally designed for students to help them consolidate their college admission platforms.
“I’m a junior, right, so I’m thinking a lot about college admission,” he said. “A lot of my stuff was scattered. My essays were in Docs, my lists were in Excel, my enrichment of colleges were in AI. It was just a very scattered process.”
Skora is a cloud-based assessment system that not only brings all information into one platform, but it’s also connected to more than 2,000 colleges’ admission standards. Students can try it for free at SkoraAdmit.com.
He’s currently fine-tuning a proprietary model that will take GPAs, extracurricular activities and SAT scores, then have AI recommend colleges based on a student’s major, skills and grades. Now, he’s transitioned the Skora program to assist college counselors who can use a branded version to manage students.
Fawcett deftly balances school, AI programming and his work with CHG so he has time for projects like designing a Roblox game and an AI program that scans Pokémon cards to find current prices.
In addition to publishing two research papers on the Social Science Research Network, Fawcett started a coding competition for students, sponsored by Pluralsight and CHG. He also conducts independent software-engineering research.
“It’s not even work anymore because I genuinely am so interested in it,” he said. “I think that’s one of the good things that I like about my personal learning is I don’t see it as work. I’ll listen to podcasts, I’ll read conversations with my coworkers, and it just seems fun.”
To stay on top of a constantly evolving industry, Fawcett uses agents that give him daily updates on competitors and emerging programs and platforms.
“It’s rapid, so I think you need to have a constant learning mindset that isn’t forced,” he said. “You’ve got to find the joy in it.”
Fawcett’s favorite day of the week is Thursday, when he goes into the CHG office and learns from his colleagues. He knows he’s been given an opportunity to learn from the best, and he plans to take advantage of it.
“I like being around smart people,” he said. “The amount you have to learn is insane. I love learning because I’ll never be the smartest person in the world in AI. There are always people to learn from.”
While his AI career is taking off, he has no desire to rush through his high school experience. He enjoys social interaction and is talking with his science teachers about entering the International Science and Engineering Fair. Eventually, he wants to attend the University of Pennsylvania, studying business and computer science.
“I’m always trying to keep that open mind, always trying to talk to people who know more than me,” Fawcett said. “I never get the ego of thinking that I know enough that I can just chill and ride the wave.”
To learn more about Fawcett’s accomplishments, visit ParkerFawcett.com.
