Vietnam student was academic standout at CSC

Hau Pham is a native of Vietnam who has excelled as an American college student. He earned nothing but A’s at both Oxnard College, a two-year institution in California, and at Chadron State, where he spent the last two years.

Known as “Howie” throughout the CSC campus, Pham reaped an array of awards during Chadron State’s year-ending ceremonies. He graduated Summa Cum Laude because of his perfect 4.0 grade point average, was named the outstanding senior scholar majoring in finance, was the recipient of the Dow Jones and Company Award, which includes an engraved paperweight and a one-year subscription to the Wall Street Journal, and was among 25 upperclassmen selected by the faculty for Who’s Who Among Students in American Colleges and Universities.

In addition, he was inducted into the CSC chapter of Omicron Delta Epsilon, an international honor society in economics.

Among those amazed by Pham’s intellectual capacity is Dr. Thom Swanke, who teaches economics.

“When he reads something he understands,” said Swanke. “I always graded Howie’s paper first (after a test) to make sure my key was correct. This was my 14th year of teaching at the college level, and he has to rank as one of the top five students I’ve ever taught.”

Now 22, Pham was born and raised in Ho Chi Minh City, which was Saigon and the capital of South Vietnam before the country was unified after the Vietnam War. His father works in labor relations for the city government and his mother owns and operates a hardware store, he said. He has a brother and a sister.

Pham went to Chelsea, Mich., as a Rotary exchange student in 2002-03, when he was a senior in high school. He said he barely spoke English, when he arrived but still managed to do well academically.

After the year in Michigan, he chose to stay in the United States to attend college, and enrolled at Oxnard College in the Los Angeles area. He took what most would agree are rigorous courses, including three in calculus, microeconomics, accounting and business law.

His choice of coursework at CSC continued along the same lines. They included business communications, finance and statistics, money and banking, principles of marketing, quantitative methods, professional ethics, applied statistics, dynamic web page development, data base management and systems analysis and design.

As he was preparing to graduate from Oxnard, Pham was accepted at UCLA, but the cost would have been about $40,000 a year, he said. While pondering how he could come up with that much money, Pham landed a job in a restaurant. One of his fellow employees in the kitchen was Tabarek Teketel, a native of Ethiopia who had graduated from CSC in December 2004 and was attending graduate school in Michigan. (International students get around.)

“I complained about the high cost at UCLA and he told me about Chadron State,” Pham remembers. “He said I could do well there. I did some research, decided it would be OK and that’s how I got here.”

As with other Asian societies, Pham said there is pressure for youths in his country to study hard and do well in school. He returned home last summer for the first time since he’d left in 2002. It was a bit risky because the Vietnamese government sometimes refuses to let students return to foreign countries. In fact, that happened to one of Pham’s friends. But Howie said he had no difficulty getting permission to fly back to the United States. He believes that was because of his outstanding academic record.

The trip back home wasn’t all good, however. The laptop computer that he took with to Vietnam was stolen from the Pham home while he was there.

Working with computers is his passion, Pham said. “It’s something that I enjoy very much. I love computers.”

Pham plans to remain in the U.S. and earn a master’s degree in information technology, a computer-driven course of study, before returning to his homeland to live.

At the time of his graduation from CSC, he had been accepted at both Willamette University in Salem, Ore., and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He said would prefer to attend George Washington, but hadn’t received details on the financial package it would offer. Willamette would waive his tuition and provide a $5,000 annual stipend.

Although on the shy side, Pham said he appreciated the friendliness that the people of Chadron and at the college display. “The people are nice here,” he noted. “Most places where I have been the people don’t smile and say hi like they do here.”

Pham added that there is one thing that could have made his time at Chadron State even more pleasant here. “I wish they had a soccer team. I would love to have played it.”