Ngày 14: 7 năm trong 1 bài luận

Sau đây là bài luận mình viết để apply Watson Fellowship - 1 chương trình 1 năm sau khi tốt nghiệp trong mơ mình đã ấp ủ suốt 2 năm qua. Khi các bạn đang đọc bài viết này, mình sẽ nhận được kết quả buổi phỏng vấn vòng 2 của chương trình. Nếu được chọn, mình sẽ là 1 trong 2 đại diện trường ở vòng quốc gia.

Trước buổi phỏng vấn này, phải 7 năm rồi từ vòng phỏng vấn cuối cùng của UWC, mình mới cảm thấy bồn chồn như bây giờ (lúc mình viết những dòng này). Mình lo lắng vì kết quả này, giống UWC, sẽ ảnh hưởng đến kế hoạch và cuộc sống của mình trong 20 tháng tới. 4 ngày trước buổi phỏng vấn, mình băn khoăn không biết mình có đủ giỏi không, đủ phù hợp không, đủ xứng đáng không.

Và mỗi khi có những suy nghĩ này, mình thường tìm về lý do mình bắt đầu, lý do mình muốn apply, lý do mình làm mọi thứ mình từng làm, đang làm, và sẽ làm. Bài luận bạn chuẩn bị đọc dưới đây, là 1 lời nhắc nhở mình gửi cho bản thân, về hành trình ước mơ của mình thành hình và thay đổi.

Mình muốn chia sẻ bài viết này, vì mình cảm thấy tự hào về hành trình đã đi qua, và cái đích mình đang hướng đến. Bất kể kết quả có ra sao, đó cũng chỉ là 1 con đường mình phải đi để tới được mục đích cuối cùng.

Bài viết dài 1500 từ, cảnh báo rồi nhé 😂

— Here we go —

I remember it as if it was yesterday, the first time I felt the weight of the word “privilege”. In the only room in my house where I can “pirate” the neighbor’s wifi, I hunched over my mom’s crummy five-year-old laptop, scrolling through pages and pages of college websites, trying to make sense of American college admission. Three hours into the disorienting project, I burst into tears, feeling completely hopeless. Why is information so expensive? Why don’t I have the money to pay a private counselor to guide me through this process? If I’m struggling this much, how much more struggles must students in remote towns go through if they have the same goal as mine?

It was that last question that made me realize my fortunate reality: I have a comfortable roof above my head, I go to one of the most prestigious high schools in Vietnam, both of my parents are middle-class intellectuals, I have a laptop with access to “borrowed” Internet, and we live in the most developed city in the country. This means that I get my hands on information and opportunities earlier than 99% of other Vietnamese students. It was that scorching summer night in 2015, in that little storage room, that my vision of a more just world began to take shape. My battlefield is education. I, then, dreamt of starting a college consulting business with a focus on underserved communities all over Vietnam.

I held on to that dream for four years, until my trip to Accra and Takoradi - two beautiful coastal cities in Ghana. On my first day in Ghana, I instantly knew this was the poorest country I had ever been to. I saw run-down, second-hand cars rolling on bumpy roads, avoiding giant potholes. Waves of people moving in and out of slumps combined with temporary markets, some minding their own businesses, some trying to sell packaged water and fried plantain to people on the trotros (long-distance buses). Everyone’s trying to make a living in the 95 degrees, inescapable heat. By 6 P.M, when the sun was down, there was no sign of lights, even on the highway. Lights did appear when my taxi was stopped by a military checkpoint. The guards flashed their lights on my face, asked the driver some questions in Fante, got their bribe, and let us continue. On my last day in Accra, I got to visit the Supreme Court of Ghana. It was a beautiful, massive complex with a colonial design, but what surprised me the most was the poster at the front desk of the main entrance. The poster says: “Please, resist bribery!” Not “no,” but to just “resist.”

All of these experiences could have just let me remember Ghana by its stereotypical poverty with high unemployment and a corrupt government that fails to provide good social infrastructure, a story Western media has told way too many times. But it only took one experience to shatter this narrative. On my first day in Ghana, I had the chance to meet three Ghanaian entrepreneurs who left their comfortable lives in the U.S. and the U.K. to come back “home”. Yvette, a UCL graduate, told me her stories of building trust again with her own people, of her first few months going down to the field with farmers, then now, of the successful dried fruit export company she has built. Kofi, an ex-Google engineer, told me his story of building the first high-speed Internet cable in Ghana, and how painful it was to not be protected by law for his property right. And finally, a Ghanaian twin who both went to Brown told me their story of founding Kaeme, and their aspirations to put Ghanaian black soap on the world’s cosmetic map. All of them told me their homecoming stories, of all the reverse-cultural shocks, political bureaucrats, and entrepreneurial obstacles. But they didn’t tell these stories with grim faces or furrowed eyebrows; they did it with laughter and sparkling eyes. Because it was those obstacles that made their return so meaningful. They came back, not for an easier life. They left that behind. They came back to build their home.

And that’s a different narrative.

It took me four years since I embarked on my education abroad on 2 continents to realize the underlying problem that deteriorates Vietnam and developing nations alike - Brain Drain. There are 2.5 million people who emigrated from Vietnam from 1990 to 2015, according to UN DESA. Not many of them are coming back. I realized that my dream was flawed. The opportunity to study abroad is only accessible to two groups: the super-rich and the super-smart. In order to improve Vietnam’s education, giving just a few access to a world-class education is neither a fair nor sustainable approach. I understood that education reform needs to happen from the inside out.

I let go of the dream that I had held for four years of opening an education consultancy to ponder upon a new dream: that my children will no longer need to go abroad for quality education, because they will have all the best choices within Vietnam.

In the next 6 months of 2020, I interned at two major education startups in Vietnam, gave a TED talk, and toured 11 cities in Vietnam to talk to 600 blog readers about my dream. But none of those came close to satisfying my aspiration. Finally, when Covid-19 forced me to take a gap year, I had an idea about how to help Vietnamese students dream better. I found my education startup (MỞ - MƠ và Hỏi, which translates to Open - Dream and Question) in July of 2020, with a goal to inspire and support more Vietnamese students on their lifelong learning journey. Since then, we have provided 25 community-driven online courses for more than 400 Vietnamese high school students and undergraduates. We cover every topic you can imagine from a liberal arts education like Science of Learning, Blogging, Data Science, Film and Philosophy, etc. I am now leading a remote team of twenty, spanning four continents.

My experience growing one of the first Cohort-based education businesses in Vietnam over the past two years has taught me that the future of learning and work will always be changing. New, better approaches are being created every day to challenge the status quo. The focus of my Watson project will be on “Challenger Universities: The future of learning and work”. The core question of this project will be: What are the emerging models of higher education that have the potential to transform how we think about the future of work and learning? Other peripheral questions are:

• How do different countries and different cultures view and practice lifelong learning?

• Will higher education become cheaper, or will its costs continue to skyrocket?

• Will shorter programs focusing on upskilling & real job outcomes for students replace traditional 4-year programs?

• How can colleges better prepare their students for a hyper-competitive remote labor market?

According to the World Bank’s report in 2022, Vietnam is aiming to reach upper-middle-income by 2035. In order to reach this goal, Vietnam would need to double its higher education enrollment (from 1.9 million to 3.8 million students) by 2035. From my perspective, Vietnam’s education system is facing two major problems: accessibility (the number of students enrolled in higher education) and quality (the number of world-class institutions that can provide globally-competitive workers). And the hardest part is, we cannot just “copy and paste” what other developed countries have done. It took Harvard nearly 400 years and multi-billion dollars to establish itself as a world-class educational institution. Vietnam doesn’t have multi-billion dollars or 400 years. We have 13 years. So our only hope is to find newer and profoundly more innovative approaches to rethink and rebuild higher education.

I want to be a part of the solution. From my experience living in 3 countries and traveling to 17 around the world, I am applying to the Watson Fellowship because I deeply appreciate the transformative power of immersing in new cultures. New cultures offer new perspectives, new perspectives offer new ideas, and new ideas drive change and innovation.

Preparing for an uncertain future of learning and work for 100 million people is a massive project. But what I have learned in Ghana is that if you have found a purpose great enough to put your heart into, nothing can stop you. Like the Ghanaian entrepreneurs, I want to be able to sit down with the next generations of Vietnamese youth, and tell them the story of my own homecoming.

— the end —

me taking a selfie in Quang Tri, at one of the 12 events in my “blog tour” back in 2020.

I’m proud of you, for trying.