Before completing her graduation thesis, Trang was informed by NUS that the university had agreed to grant a full scholarship to fund her study at the school for a doctorate in digital technology in finance.   

In addition to tuition, Trang will receive a stipend of 3,000 SGD each month for four years.

First in exams

Trang's mother is a mathematics teacher and her father is a lecturer at Hanoi Architecture University. She passed the entrance exam to the math majoring class at the Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for the Gifted, the most prestigious general school in Hanoi.

“I find it interesting studying math, because the subject can help me think logically, improve my analytical ability and my arguments based on numbers,” she said.

In 2020, Trang scored first on the university entrance exam to the Computing and Information Science Faculty at the Hanoi University of Natural Sciences.

Trang decided that she would study abroad after her bachelor’s degree, so she vowed to get impressive GPAs. 

But a high GPA is not the only factor to obtain scholarships from foreign schools. But Trang believes that this was helpful when she competing with very capable candidates.

At the moment of application submission, Trang’s GPA was 3.73/4, the first in her mathematics study.

Trang said her greatest strong point is that she always makes daily to-do lists. This allows her to manage her time and follow her plans.

She began preparing her dossier to apply for her PhD scholarship when she was a second-year university student. 

Her initial goal was the EU’s Erasmus Mundus scholarship. However, when she consulted with her lecturers, she was advised to study for a doctorate in Singapore.

As a sophomore of the Hanoi University of Natural Sciences, Trang joined a lab with focus on reinforcement learning, a branch of machine learning. 

She said she was lucky when her advisor taught her how to write a scientific article, how to present her ideas, and how to choose suitable words. In late April 2024, Trang had an article published in Q1-Neural Computing and Applications as a co-author.

Prior to that, she had a research work that won first prize in her faculty and third prize at the Hanoi University of Natural Sciences. In 2024, she once again won first prize in the faculty and the school for another research project.

Asked about the application process to the PhD program, Trang said the interviewer was a dean of the NUS and director of the scholarship program.

“During the interview, I was asked about my experience in research and my independent research ability,” she recalled.

Pressure and tears

As a student with outstanding achievements, Trang admits that she once felt a lot of pressure.

“I wanted to obtain a scholarship to study abroad, so obtaining a high GPA was a heavy burden on me,” she said, recalling the day when she got a C grade for Introduction to Computer Security and she burst into tears. However, this was a valuable experience.

Trang said she has many good memories when studying at the Hanoi University of Natural Sciences. She became a speaker at a seminar on strengthening the participation of female scientists in STEM in Vietnam where she said that men and women have equal research capacity.

Trang was also one of the school’s most outstanding students chosen to receive Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his wife during their visit to Vietnam at the end of August 2023. This gave her the opportunity to have lunch with the Prime Minister.

Trang is leaving Vietnam for Singapore on August 4. She will study and conduct research in digital technology in finance, a field that she has never studied before.

Thuy Nga