Major: Integrated Management
(2016 – 2018)
If you’re moving on from my first milestone at FTU, or simply passing it on, you’re now at my next stop – Studying abroad!
Ever since I was a little kid, my dream was to travel the world (to as many places as I was able to). I remembered always giving admire look to businessmen, pilots, flight attendants, or simply my friends whose parents were rich, because they were traveling a lot, especially overseas. To me these people were having the most desirable life, one that I wished for as a young child. I had been carrying on the dream with me through elementary school, secondary school, high school, and then college. Though it is true that the first dream a kid ever has can fluctuate, or be altered as he/she grows up by the changes of the society, family situation, and of course the desire of the kid’s parents, that dream of mine has never died. It just magically made its way to sneak into every corner of my soul and silently grew, until one day I surprisingly realized how big it had filled my heart and mine. If there’s anything, that would be my dream of exploring the world had somehow converted its purpose from merely traveling to places into living and studying in a foreign country!
Believe it or not, I have always been clear about the foreign country I wanted to live and study – America. Not the UK. Not Europe. Not Australia. Not Singapore, nor Korea, nor Japan. As a kid, I had heard and told enough stories about a big country half way around the Earth from Saigon, named the US, where people from all over the world came and settled down to build their dreams, that I was determined it had to be the one and only US that I wanted to go. And though I was clearly aware of my family’s weak financial condition, I never let it be the biggest obstacle to prevent me from pursuing my dream. For my entire life, I may appear to be the most fragile and pessimistic girl in the universe when it comes to love, but as I talk about my dream, I have always been the strongest, most optimistic, and realistic girl you have ever spoken to. I always knew that if money was the only problem, then I would tackle it other ways. Lucky for me, America was known to be the most generous country that would grant SCHOLARSHIP of all kinds to students around the world, as long as the students could prove how talented they were and whether they deserved the scholarship.
I worked my way to make my dreams come true at early age. I started to save money every time I got lucky money or pocket money as soon as I was in secondary school. As I entered into one of the high schools for the gifted of Saigon, I followed my friends to many foreign schools’ conferences hosted anywhere in the city, collected as much information as possible, carefully learned about different schools’ admissions, and began preparing for the admissions. I was working hard and performing so well in class that even a big part of me was once proud of myself without the need to be recognized by anyone else. But every of my hard work was only to serve the goal of going to America for school, and every single thing I did was to get one step closer to the goal. I went from an all-nighter English student in high school to a full-time English student in college. I couldn’t even count how many notebooks that have been fully used for vocabulary, grammar, and structures taken from novels and economic books, from intermediate to highly advanced levels. I was excellent in listening and speaking, but was much slower in writing and reading. So, I spent countless days reading from genre to genre, and writing from nonsense paragraphs to to TOEFL and IELTS essays, hoping to soon improve my weaknesses though I tried to manage my workload in moderation.
If hard work paid off, no matter how soon or late it paid, then it really paid just the about the time I never expected the most, and that was when I nearly completed my senior year at FTU. Just right before I had my final exams in the Fall semester that year, I happened to learn about an exchange program between FTU and Niagara University, which could later turn into a transfer program for any students who were qualified and met all requirements from Niagara University. My intuition told me this could be the critical point of my life if I joined the program. So, I talked to my parents how I thought it might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that proceeding the plan could forever change my future (and I was right!).
I got ready for the trip to America in 3 weeks! The kind of pressure I was going through at that time made 3 weeks feel like 3 centuries, and they slipped through the gaps between my fingers in just a blink of an eye. I had to rush preparing for the school’s admission, getting an acceptance letter, having I-20s and legal documents done, and interviewing for a visa. The last week in Saigon, I and my mom rushed through any malls and markets we could think of to shop for winter clothes (back then it was hard to find a store that sold decent winter clothes in Saigon because the weather here was hot all year round. Now we have Zara, H&M, Gap, Old Navy, Uniqlo, etc. literally any international brands that sell seasonal items including those for winter time). Then it finally came the day I flew out of Vietnam! It was not really the first time I flew overseas because my family traveled to Thailand months prior to my trip, but it obviously was the first time I traveled in a long flight which lasted more than 24 hours. But wait a second! Me, going to America, for school??? That was the first thing in my life that felt so unreal and impossible, but at the same time so magical!
And there I was – on Niagara University campus, in a snowy evening, all trembling with cold and kind of homesick, unbelievably amazed that I was then 10,000 miles away from home! And yes, that was how a whole new chapter of my life began.
(Again) Here’s a much more interesting part of the story you might want to know:
- Throughout the course of my college life, I had met and worked with many people who had impacts on my life that were so meaningful that it changed the person in me forever. But if there was anyone I wanted to say thanks the most, that would be Dr. Anna McNab. She taught me in E-Commerce class from Undergraduate level, and later Information System from Graduate level. I walked into the E-Commerce class as a very shy and quiet Asian student, who had known nothing about creating a commercial website and believed that I would fail the class. And to my surprise, Dr. McNab did not let it happen. As she secretly observed every one of her student, she understood which kids needed help. Then she started to implement her work to help the students by using one of her most powerful tools, which was neither the easy-to-understand lessons nor her graciousness, but the encouragements and compliments that were true from her heart. I never forgot the time I walked side by side with her out of the classroom, both staring at the magnolia tree that was half blooming in March, just to hear she say, “You’re doing an amazing job. I love your work! How did you get that kind of talent?”. In my memory, I could not think of a time when I heard of something that nice when I was in college in Vietnam. I understood that blindly praising someone so much could cause them to have illusions about their true ability. But it didn’t mean you had to degrade their’s just to make them aim higher and try harder. Sometimes, that even resulted in reverse effects. There was no good about making one feel so low about oneself. And not only until I attended Dr. McNab had I realized for the first time how magical and powerful a compliment could be. It could save a broken soul and became a strong motivation for those that got used to believing they’re self-deprecating. It could change a lot of lives, one of which was mine! And not only did her heartfelt compliments altered a major part of my perception, it also turned me from an anti-technology person to a more tech-knowledgeable one. Other than that, with her support and sufficient instruction, I amazingly finished the website project on my own (which I would never show to any Web Developer but could proudly give it some credits because I put so much effort and time into and produce such a great work!)
- Thanks to Dr.McNab, other professors I had the chance to work with, the school staff who never stopped showering me with encouragements, love and support, the decent friends I made, anyone that gave so much meanings to my NU life and made it such a wonderful one, and those who greatly contributed to the most positive change of my life here, I decided to transfer to NU after two exchange semesters. I finished my undergraduate program and got a Bachelor’s Degree in May 2018.
- My overall GPA: 3.4 – Dean’s list: 3 semesters.
