Nguyen Hong Hanh has won full four-year scholarships from 11 US colleges and universities.

Hanh, who is focusing on English studies in her senior year at Hanoi-Amsterdam High School, has decided on Stanford University, where tuition and living expenses without scholarships is US$57,000 per year. That’s a total of $228,000 over her full four year course.

Hanh says she chose Stanford over her other favorites like Yale and Princeton, “because Stanford is young and active. It’s also in California, which has Vietnamese pho, blue seas and clear skies.”

She says friends she met through VietAbroader, an organization of overseas Vietnamese students, first told her about Stanford when she was in tenth grade.

Hanh visited the university in 2007 when she was studying in the US on a one-year scholarship at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut.

“A Stanford student took me to a public administration class,” Hanh says. “It was so great! The professor posed a problem for students to discuss and I participated as well.”

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Before she heads to the US in September, Hanh says she’s trying to make the best of the next three months by educating students at Thanh Cong Secondary School about recycling through a volunteer club. She and two friends are providing training in leadership skills, environmental education and waste management.

She’s had plenty of experience in community capacity-building and youth empowerment as a coordinator for SealNET, an organization founded by Stanford students and professionals that promotes service and leadership in the Southeast Asian Region.

In 2006, she began organizing the network in Da Nang, mainly helping to provide leadership training courses for local students there.

As a student at Hanoi-Amsterdam, a public magnet school for the gifted known as one of the best high schools in Vietnam, Hanh began applying to the US universities last year.

Confident about her English skills and good academic performance, the runner up of the National English Competition for Gifted High School Students says she aimed at studying in the US a long time ago when making friends with members from VietAbroad.

She applied to Brown University, Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, Williams College, Swarthmore College, Princeton University, Yale University, Oberlin College, Cornell University, Mount Holyoke College and Stanford.

Five of the schools – Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale and Cornell – are in the prestigious “Ivy League,” a group of eight institutions generally considered the best the US has to offer.

Le Sy Huy Anh, another twelfth-grader studying English at Hanoi-Amsterdam, says no one was surprised when Hanh won the 11 scholarships.

“She writes the best English essays at our school,” Anh says.

VietNamNet/TN/TT/TP