VietNamNet Bridge – Born in 1988, Nguyen Dang Viet Anh has joined Google after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“Enthusiastic, outstandingly talented but very modest and polite… Viet Anh is a representative of the young generation that any country wishes to have,” MIT’s Prof. Stephen Intille praised his good student in an email to Tuoi Tre newspaper.

Failing an exam – a shock

Viet Anh was always serious and self-conscious in study, so he completely won his parents’ trust. “Not playing computer games over 11pm” was the only one rule that they set for the boy.

“Once when I was an eight grader, my dad detected that I took to the computer over mid-night,” Viet Anh recalled. However, the father did not scold his son, but listened to the boy to passionately tell about a computer game that he was creating.

That week, the father took his son to the Hanoi Children’s Palace to participate in an IT class. The more he learned about computers, the more Viet Anh liked it. He won many IT prizes and passed an exam to enter the Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for Gifted Students, the most famous high school in Hanoi. He entered the school’s IT team and was the team’s leader.

Winning three national IT prize for amateur young IT expert, Viet Anh became the great hope of his family and his school at IT contests. “That invisible burden made me fail in an IT contest of Hanoi when I was an 11th grader. That failure astonished others while I was depressed,” Viet Anh recalled.

To refresh himself, Viet Anh convened his parents to allow him to study in the US under a cultural exchange program at the end of the 11th grade.

Studying at… Las Vegas

Las Vegas – the city of gambling – was the place where Viet Anh was sent to study. “Some people teased my parents that they were about to lose me,” Viet Anh said.

However, within ten months, Viet Anh achieved A+ mark at his school and 2400/2400 mark at the SAT II, regardless of the language barrier. However, his family and his American adopted father were worried when the boy applied to the MIT.

“That was the morning of a weekend day. I was shivering when I received the MIT’s announcement that I won a $200,000 scholarship,” he remembered.

It was very hard to study at the US’ top institute of technology but Viet Anh was not discouraged. He joined many projects for students to learn experience. He was chosen by IBM, Microsoft groups as their apprentice when he was a second-year student.

“Hello, I come from Vietnam”

In the early fourth year, when Viet Anh was a trainee in Beijing, at the invitation of the Microsoft Asia Research Institute, he was assigned to cover the mobile technique to raise people’s health. Viet Anh had a chance to make presentation to Bill Gates about his software on daily regimen named MyWalk.

Viet Anh received a master diploma on computer sciences after five years at the MIT. He overcame severe exams at big IT groups in the US and was admitted by Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

Selecting the position of a software engineer on Android technique at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, the Silicon Valley, Viet Anh explained: “This is the home to the most of the IT talents in the world. I need this opportunity to learn from them.”

“However, my greatest pride is not my success but my origin and my Vietnamese name. Seeing Bill Gates or high-ranking IT officials, my first words were always: Hello, my name is Viet Anh and I come from Viet Nam,” Viet Anh told HCM City’s students during talks in October.

Source: TTCT