VietNamNet Bridge – The most excellent students are from poor families or poor provinces who have to struggle to survive every day, and who don’t have the money to buy textbooks or the time to devote to their studies.

Pham Thi Ngoc Bien, a student from Dak Lak, who came first at the exam to the HCM City University of Social Sciences and Humanity, was also born into a poor family. All the four members of the family live on the profits from the mother’s soya-cake shop. The father died many years ago.

The top scorer at the 2014 entrance exam to the Hanoi Law School is Le Thi Thoa from a mountainous area of Kim Bang District in Ha Nam Province.

As the high school was 25 kilometers far away from his home, Thoa had to live in a small rented room during the three years she followed secondary education.

She rode her bicycle home every weekend and came back to school early the next week with rice and food given to her by the parents. She only had rice, salt and roasted peanuts for food, and VND50,000 for one week of expenses.

Since her parents could not pay for her study at high school, Thoa had to take extra work at a food shop to earn money to continue studying.

Meanwhile, the parents of Nguyen Huu Tien, the 2013’s top scorer at the Hanoi Medical University, were reportedly so poor that the father had to live in a sewer area and take any jobs to make money to feed his family.

It seems that the poorest students are the best students.

Le Huu Lap from the Posts and Telecommunication Institute of Technology (PTIT) noted that it is very difficult to find top scorers who come from rich families.

“Poor clever students believe that studying well is the only way that helps them improve the living standards. Therefore, they are ready to cope with all difficulties and learn hard to be able to follow higher education,” Lap commented.

Lap also thinks that rural students only have one thing to do – learning and working hard to escape poverty, while urban students nowadays are easily diverted by a lot of pleasures. Therefore, urban students do not spend much time on studying like rural students.

The headmaster of a high school for the gifted in HCM City also noted that many excellent students of the school are from poor families.

“They have strong motivation to study well to have a new life,” he said. “Our ancestors also say: talent can only be created through hard training.”

He said that this could be the reason why many top scorers and excellent people are from the central region, the area with high percentage of poor households due to severe weather conditions and exhausted soil that is not favorable for farming.

A student from the Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for the Gifted, the most famous high school in the capital city, believes that students in big cities are not worse than rural students.

“A lot of my classmates study abroad right after graduating from high school. They do not intend to attend the entrance exams to domestic universities,” she explained.