Part 6 of my personal journey series.

I had passed the entrance exam. I had arrived in Ho Chi Minh City. I had a place at one of Vietnam’s best technical universities. What I hadn’t fully accounted for was the people.

The Smartest Room I’d Ever Been In

Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology draws students from across Vietnam — not just the south, but the central provinces, the north, everywhere. These were the students who had topped their regional exams, who had spent years preparing for exactly this. Some of them had been attending specialised gifted schools with dedicated CS and mathematics programmes. Some had been coding since they were twelve.

I had grown up on a coffee plantation and studied hard in a highland town with reasonable but not exceptional schools. The gap was real.

In the first year, I sat in lectures and watched classmates absorb material at a speed that genuinely unsettled me. They would ask questions in tutorials that were more sophisticated than the answers I was still working out in my head. In study groups, they moved between concepts with a fluency that came from years of preparation I simply hadn’t had.

I was not the worst student. But I was aware, every day, of the distance between where I was and where the best of them were.

It took me two years to close that gap to something manageable. Two years of studying longer than most people, of going back to fundamentals when I didn’t understand something rather than papering over it, of learning not just from lecturers but from the classmates who were ahead of me. I watched how they thought. I asked questions I was sometimes embarrassed to ask. I treated the smart people around me as a resource, not a threat.

By the third year, I was keeping up. Eventually I was contributing.

The Honour Class — Last on the List

In my second year, there was an opportunity to be selected for the honour class — a smaller cohort of high-performing students who would follow an accelerated, more rigorous curriculum.

I applied. My score was good enough to qualify. Barely. I was ranked last among those selected.

I remember that detail precisely because it mattered to me. Not as a source of shame — I had earned the place — but as a useful piece of information. I was the weakest person in a room of strong people. That is a specific position, and it has specific implications: you have the most to learn, the least margin for complacency, and the most to gain from being exactly where you are.

The honour class was harder. The material went deeper. The expectations were higher. The students were, if anything, even more capable than those in the regular cohort. I was back in the uncomfortable position of being behind, and I chose, again, to treat it as an advantage.

What University Taught Me About CS

Four years of Computer Science at HCMUT gave me something I’ve never stopped drawing on: genuine fundamentals.

Algorithms and data structures — not just how to use them, but how to analyse them, how to prove their correctness, how to reason about time and space complexity. Discrete mathematics. Operating systems. Computer architecture. Networks. Databases. Compilers. Software engineering principles.

The curriculum was not oriented toward what was fashionable or immediately employable. It was oriented toward what was foundational. At the time, I sometimes wished for more practical applications. In retrospect, I’m grateful for the depth. The industry changes constantly — new languages, new frameworks, new paradigms. But the fundamentals are why I can pick up new things quickly, why I can read a paper and understand it, why I can reason about systems rather than just operate them.

University also taught me how to learn. That is, in the end, the most important thing any education can give you.

The Japanese Company — My First Real Independence

In my final year, I started a part-time job at a Japanese e-commerce company operating in Vietnam. It was my first real employment — not tutoring or odd jobs, but an actual software role, with responsibilities and a salary.

That salary was roughly 350 USD a month.

I need to put that in context: for a final-year student in Ho Chi Minh City in the early 2010s, 350 USD was genuinely meaningful. It was enough to cover rent, food, and basic expenses without asking my parents for anything. For the first time in my life, I was fully financially independent. That feeling — of supporting yourself entirely through your own work — is one I would not trade for anything.

The company itself was a valuable education of a different kind. Japanese work culture is distinct: the attention to process, the emphasis on quality and precision, the respect for hierarchy balanced with genuine investment in junior employees. I was expected to be thorough in a way that some Vietnamese companies at the time were not — to document, to test, to think carefully before committing. I absorbed those habits and kept them.

I also picked up fragments of Japanese. Not fluency — there wasn’t time — but enough to understand the culture better, to navigate basic interactions, to appreciate how differently a language can shape the way people communicate and collaborate. Working across cultures, I came to realise, is a skill in itself.

The AI Professor and a New Direction

In my final semester, I worked on my thesis under a professor whose research focused on Artificial Intelligence. It was, at the time, not the dominant direction in Vietnamese CS departments — this was before the deep learning revolution had fully arrived, before AI was the career everyone wanted to be in.

But the professor was genuinely excited about the subject, and excitement is contagious. We worked on problems in natural language processing and began exploring what would later be called Big Data — the challenges of processing and extracting meaning from data at a scale that conventional methods couldn’t handle.

Something clicked. The combination of mathematics, computation, and the problem of making machines understand language and patterns — it felt like the most interesting space I had encountered. More alive than systems programming. More creative than pure mathematics. More rigorous than anything vague and hand-wavy.

I finished the thesis, graduated, and knew which direction I wanted to go.

Sentifi — Where Everything Accelerated

My first job after graduation was at Sentifi, a Swiss-based fintech startup with operations in Ho Chi Minh City. They were doing exactly what I wanted to be doing: NLP, machine learning, Big Data pipelines at real scale.

The work was challenging in the best way. I was building large-scale streaming pipelines that processed billions of messages from Twitter, news sources, and financial blogs. I was working on NLP models for financial text. I was learning, every day, from engineers who were significantly better than me — senior developers who had been doing this for years, who had seen how good code was supposed to look and were uncompromising about it.

Those senior developers shaped how I think about software. They taught me not just what to build, but how to build it — how to write code that others can read, how to design systems that can be extended, how to think about failure modes before they become incidents. Technical skill without these things is limited. With them, it compounds.

Sentifi was also where I first worked with people from genuinely different backgrounds — not just different parts of Vietnam, but different countries, different industries, different ways of approaching problems. That exposure changed how I thought about what “good” looked like.

Salman

At Sentifi, I met Salman Jaffer.

He had come from the UK — experienced, technically sharp, and someone who took the work and the people around him seriously. We worked together closely enough that I came to understand how he thought: how he approached problems, how he communicated, how he made decisions.

He was the kind of colleague who makes you better by proximity. Not through explicit mentorship, though there was some of that, but through the standards he held and the way he operated. Working alongside someone like that raises your own floor.

When Salman eventually left Sentifi and moved back to Singapore, he reached out to me. There was an opportunity, he said. Would I consider coming?

I thought about Ha Tinh. I thought about the highlands. I thought about my father’s words before I left for university. I thought about every time in my life that the right move had been to go somewhere harder, somewhere with more to learn, somewhere that required something of me.

I said yes.

Next: Singapore — a new country, a new chapter, and what happens when you arrive somewhere with almost nothing and have to build again.

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