Personal Statement from a Vietnamese Person

Before I was five, I thought I was Chinese. However, I wondered why I couldn’t understand the Chinese patrons of Chinatown restaurants. Upon learning my true ethnicity, I pulled out a mammoth atlas we had under the bed. My father pointed to an “S”-shaped country bordering the ocean, below China. It was then that I learned my parents were refugees from Vietnam. “Boat people,” my mother, still struggling to grasp English back then, would hear kids whispering when she walked through the halls of her high school. Like many refugees, although my parents and their families weren’t wealthy when they came to America, they were willing to work hard, and like many Vietnamese parents, mine would tell me, “We want you to be success.”

My parents are two of the most hardworking people I know. Although a college dropout, my father is now an engineer at the Boeing Company, while my mother ran a well-known daycare until I started high school. My parents had decided to homeschool my three siblings and me a little after I was born, and to do so, they had no qualms about sacrificing time, money, or respect. When I entered ninth grade, my parents chose to close my mother’s daycare to better homeschool my siblings and me, which meant my father had to then single-handedly support our family of six.

Not until I started attending Seattle Central Community College (SCCC) as a Running Start student did I appreciate the sacrifices my parents had made. By meeting people from diverse backgrounds at SCCC and spending more time apart from my family, I finally understood what my parents had been trying to teach me through homeschooling. They wanted to nurture my spiritual needs and didn’t want me to forget our cultural background and values, especially...

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..., as well as the management experience, to one day open an engineering firm, an aspiration sparked by my parents who ran their own small businesses. I hope to learn how to tackle problems associated with building structures of unorthodox yet sustainable design so that, as a structural engineer, I could bring to reality art that can endure tumultuous storms and dynamic humans. I want to build structures that in turn build the future.

My parents would often tell me, “We want you to be success.” They mean “successful,” but by striving to become a structural engineer, I strive not just to become successful but become a success. In their love for family, my parents have spent time and energy into unlocking the potential they saw in me. I would like to inspire people by building structures no one believed was possible and, by doing so, unlock the potential in others.