Part 5 of my personal journey series. Read Part 4 here.

Ho Chi Minh City hits you all at once.

Coming from a highland town, and before that a village in Ha Tinh, the scale of it is simply incomprehensible until you are standing in the middle of it. The traffic — millions of motorbikes in constant negotiation with each other, moving by rules that seem improvised but somehow work. The noise. The smell of street food mixing with exhaust. The towers going up alongside the old French colonial buildings. The sheer density of people, all of them moving, all of them wanting something.

I arrived in 2010 to study Computer Science at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology — Đại học Bách Khoa, one of the country’s most respected technical universities. I was nineteen years old, knew almost no one, and had very little money. I was not unusual in any of these respects.

HCMUT

The university was serious in the way that good technical institutions are serious — demanding, competitive, full of people who had worked hard to be there and intended to make use of it. The curriculum was rigorous: mathematics, physics, algorithms, data structures, programming, systems. In the first year alone, the attrition was significant. Many students who had excelled in provincial high schools found the gap between what they knew and what was required to be larger than expected.

I found it hard too. But I had been in difficult situations before and had developed, over years, the capacity to persist through discomfort without it breaking my focus. That helped.

What I hadn’t expected was how much I would enjoy it.

Computer science — the real thing, not the surface layer — turned out to be one of the most intellectually satisfying things I had ever encountered. The mathematics of algorithms. The elegance of a well-designed data structure. The way that abstract ideas, precisely stated, could be turned into things that actually ran, actually computed, actually solved real problems. It combined the logical rigour I had always responded to with something creative and practical. You weren’t just understanding the world — you were building inside it.

The City as Education

University was only part of what Ho Chi Minh City taught me. The city itself was an education.

I worked part-time jobs to support myself — tutoring, odd jobs, whatever was available. I navigated bureaucracy, found accommodation, managed money that was barely enough. These were not hardships in any dramatic sense; they were just the conditions of being a student from a modest background in a large city. But they sharpened something.

I also encountered, for the first time, people from very different backgrounds — students from wealthy Saigon families, students from other provinces like me, international students, professors who had studied abroad. The exposure to that range of people and perspectives was its own kind of education, one the curriculum didn’t provide.

Ho Chi Minh City, at that moment in its history, felt like a place in motion. The economy was growing. Technology companies were appearing. The internet was changing everything, visibly and quickly. There was a sense that if you had the right skills, the opportunities would be real — not theoretical, not reserved for the already privileged, but genuinely available to someone willing to be good enough.

Graduation and What Came Next

I graduated in 2014, honour class, GPA 8.2. The grade mattered less than what it represented: four years of consistent work, of building a foundation that would carry me forward.

Within a year I was working as a software engineer. Within a few more, I was in machine learning, then NLP, then senior roles in Singapore. The path wasn’t linear or planned in detail — it unfolded through choices, opportunities, and a lot of work.

But it began in Ho Chi Minh City, in those lecture halls and those cramped rented rooms, with a curriculum that was hard enough to mean something.

Looking Back at the Journey

From a village in Ha Tinh to a university in the city — the distance is geographic, but it is also something else. It is the distance between a life shaped entirely by circumstance and a life shaped increasingly by choice.

I was lucky in some ways: I had an uncle who took a chance, parents who made a sacrifice, teachers who cared, and a mind that happened to be well-suited to the subject that would become most valuable. But luck and circumstance only take you so far. At some point, between the village and the city, between the coffee plantation and the lecture hall, something in me decided that the only acceptable response to the life I’d been given was to do something worthy of it.

That feeling hasn’t left me.

This series continues. Future posts will cover the move to Singapore, building a career in AI and financial technology, and what it means to live far from where you started.

Updated:

Comments