What happened to the outstanding Vietnamese students in Germany?

Seven years ago, Vu Kim Hoan caused a stir in the German media by explaining the unusual phenomenon of Vietnamese students excelling academically, ranking first among all foreign ethnic groups and even surpassing native Germans. This was demonstrated by the fact that 59% of high-achieving students in lower secondary school were selected for the 12-year general education system (graduating directly into university), five times higher than many other ethnic groups, leaving German students behind at only 43%.

Three months ago, Kim Hoan enrolled at Europe Business School (London, England), postgraduate program in business administration, class of 2017-2019, with a state scholarship awarded to outstanding students, continuously from February 2014 to August 2019.

To complement her previous major and dual degree, Kim Hoan is determined to pursue an additional master's degree in finance, tentatively scheduled for mid-semester, from July to September 2018. Her target universities are prestigious institutions, such as MIT in the United States.

Vu Kim Hoan.

To secure the financial resources for that additional course, Kim Hoan applied for a priority scholarship for academically gifted students in Germany, selected by the German University Exchange Agency through an independent committee (not affiliated with the government) based on rigorous assessments by the relevant universities.

The assessment is based on four criteria: professional competence (including high school and university graduation scores, examination results, and practical work experience...) and personal competence (social activities, experiences in other countries, extracurricular activities...); the intended study program (training objectives, implementation plan...) and feasibility (relationship with the intended study location, existing foundational knowledge for further study, duration of stay for study...), with a scoring scale from zero (lowest) to ten (excellent).

Kim Hoan received a perfect score of 10 from the appraisal agency across all four criteria.

The strange phenomenon concerning Vietnamese students.

Kim Hoàn was born on October 17, 1994. When she was four, Hoàn and her older sister, who was seven years older, were brought to Germany by their mother to reunite with their family. Hoàn's parents ran a business selling artificial flowers and plants in a Vietnamese-owned trading area in Dresden.

Upon arriving in Germany, little Hoan didn't know a single word of German. Her parents, busy with work, had to send her to daycare. Spending her days playing with friends who spoke a different language – this unexpected situation – provided Hoan with the opportunity to automatically integrate into German society from a young age.

After two years of kindergarten, Hoan enrolled in Johanna Secondary School in Dresden.

Here, throughout all four years at this school, she was an active and versatile member of the extracurricular programs organized by the school – participating in the AG club, the Theater AG performing arts group, the AG French language group, the AG athletics group, winning many trophies in competitions...

From the third grade onwards, Hoan was elected class president.

Class monitor Hoan finished his four years of junior high school with a report card summarizing all subjects with perfect scores of 1/1 (equivalent to 10/10 in Vietnam), possessing all the necessary talents, and having the right to choose to attend any specialized high school.

Ultimately, Hoan chose a foreign language specialization and enrolled in an intensive French class.

In 6th grade, Hoan participated in the National Foreign Language Olympiad, winning second place in the team category. In 7th grade, Hoan took additional Italian language classes with the AG group, and from 8th grade onwards, he continued studying Spanish.

In August 2010, the states of Hamburg and Saxony opened a multilingual practical training course for 10th-grade students. In the final results, Hoan took the written exams in French, Spanish, and German, and the oral exam in English, securing first place out of 120 candidates.

This is Vu Kim Hoan now.

Regarding Vietnamese, unlike many other Vietnamese students whose pronunciation is often inaccurate or abrupt like "a foreigner speaking Vietnamese" or "people speaking French," Kim Hoàn always pays close attention to her mother tongue.

Having studied Vietnamese regularly since the third grade, conversing in Vietnamese at home and in the community, and maintaining close ties with family, friends, and relatives – these things laid the foundation for Hoan's pure and unadulterated Vietnamese language, as her parents once advised, "If you want to excel in any foreign language, you must first be fluent in your mother tongue."

The Start-Stipendium Scholarship Fund of Germany, specifically for academically gifted, socially active students of foreign descent starting in grade 8, awarded Hoan the scholarship right from the beginning of grade 8 and continued until the end of high school.

Each year, around 15 to 20 Vietnamese students in Germany receive this scholarship out of a total of approximately 200 students nationwide (7.5 - 10%), while the percentage of Vietnamese people among all foreigners in Germany is only 1.4%.

According to Vietnamnet