'Impressive' achievement of Nghe An male student winning full scholarship from Singapore Government

14 year old male student with "huge" achievements

On Monday of this week, the Board of Directors of Dang Thai Mai Secondary School awarded the SASMO 2024 Gold Medal to Nguyen Phan Khanh Gia and other excellent students of the school. This is the Singapore and Asian Math Olympiad organized by SIMCC Singapore. Before that, on Friday, he also received gifts from Pi Magazine - the magazine of the Vietnam Mathematical Society for 6 excellent students in Math selected by the school.

Three years ago, Khanh Gia was the male student with the highest score in the admission exam to Dang Thai Mai Secondary School based on the English certificate with a PET result of 168/170 points (4th grade exam).

During his 3 years at school, in both grades 7 and 8, he was the valedictorian of English in the city’s Excellent Student Competition. This male student was also consistently in the top 5 of Vinh city in terms of Math results from grades 6 to 8.

These outstanding results have extended the achievements of this excellent student with many awards. In particular, in Mathematics alone, since grade 3, Khanh Gia has participated in many Math competitions and continuously for many years he has won medals or championship cups.

In 2021, 2022, and 2024, he won the Excellence Award in the BEBRAS Computational Thinking Challenge. This male student also won an award at the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) and was in the top 1% of the total 7,4380 candidates.

In 2024, Khanh Gia achieved a perfect score and won the International Kangaroo Math Contest (IKMC) Championship Cup.

In addition, for many years Khanh Gia has won Gold Medals at the AMO Math Competition - American Math Competition organized by SIMCC of Singapore. From 2021 to now, for 4 consecutive years he has won Gold Medals at the SASMO Math Competition - Singapore and Asian Math Olympiad organized by SIMCC Singapore. He also won Gold Medals at the SEAMO X Competition (Mathematics Proficiency Assessment Test in English for Southeast Asian Students)...

In addition to his achievements in Mathematics, Nguyen Phan Khanh Gia took the exam and obtained the Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) level C2 (equivalent to 8.5 - 9.0 IELTS) since grade 7 and achieved IELTS Academic Overall 8.0 in grade 8. In 2021, while studying at Hung Dung 1 Primary School, Khanh Gia also won 3rd prize in the National Youth Informatics Competition, 1st prize in the International English Competition Toefl Primary in the 2020 - 2021 school year...

Broad road to prestigious scholarship

The ASEAN Scholarship is a scholarship program sponsored by the Singapore Government for Southeast Asian countries. In Vietnam, each year, the Singapore Government will award full scholarships to about 20-40 students. In addition to excellent academic performance to pass the preliminary round, candidates (grade 8, 9, and 10 students) must pass 3 rounds of knowledge tests in Math, English, and IQ. Those who pass this round will be able to participate in the final round, the interview round.

Up to now, at the high school level, the ASEAN scholarship is considered the most prestigious scholarship in Vietnam with thousands of students applying every year. Nguyen Phan Khanh Gia himself, he started to know about this scholarship since his elementary school years and the person who motivated him was his older brother Nguyen Phan Khanh An.

However, 3 years ago due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Khanh An did not have the opportunity to take part in the entrance exam. Therefore, coming to the exam this year, although being the youngest student, Khanh Gia took the exam with the dream of realizing the dream of his brother and the whole family.

Accompanying Khanh Gia from the beginning of the application process and following her son through many rounds of competition in Hanoi, Ms. Phan Ngoc Lan - Khanh Gia's mother said that it was a "not easy" journey. During that process, Khanh Gia's biggest advantage was that he had quite a good record with dozens of awards in many Math, Informatics, and English competitions at home and abroad.

Besides, besides studying, I also participate in many extracurricular activities such as joining the Programming Talent Club recruited by FPT Software every year, teaching English to rural students (Rural Book Project) and many cultural, sports and artistic activities at school.

With this record, Khanh Gia easily passed the preliminary round. Participating in the second round in Hanoi with 3 subjects: Math, English and IQ, Khanh Gia had another opportunity to show himself.

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The general education program in Singapore is ahead of Vietnam's, so from the beginning of my application, I had to study the 9th grade Math textbook program in advance and get familiar with the exercises. After the first two rounds, I was quite satisfied because I had almost 10 minutes extra time in Math, and only 1/3 of the time in English.

The most difficult part was the IQ test, because this year the test structure and time were longer and more difficult than usual. Personally, when I finished this part of the test, I could only do about 70% and was not confident in the result.

Nguyen Phan Khanh Gia talks about the process of participating in the exam

In the final round, when being interviewed directly by teachers from Singapore, Khanh had the opportunity to express himself: I was not too surprised by the questions about why I chose to know about the ASEAN scholarship or why I chose to study high school in Singapore. However, when the judges asked me questions about playing games and where I planned to study at university, I was quite surprised.

In that situation, I think that being honest will win the favor of the judges. I also do not hesitate to say that I play games every day but not much and try not to let playing games affect my study schedule and other plans.

With excellent performances, Khanh Gia was happy when at the end of August, he officially received a full scholarship from the ASEAN Scholarship for 2 years of high school and 2 years of university preparation at public schools designated by the Singapore Government. The purpose of the ASEAN Scholarship program is to create conditions for outstanding young people from ASEAN countries to develop their talents and knowledge.