The valedictorian of HSU Hospitality Management with IELTS 8.0 reveals how to study effectively

Besides the graduation score of 3.97/4.0 and IELTS 8.0, the new valedictorian Nguyen Minh Thu, Hoa Sen University (HSU) also won many awards in martial arts and photography.

Nguyen Minh Thu (born in 2000, in Ho Chi Minh City) is the valedictorian who graduated from Hoa Sen University in 2023 with a cumulative score of 3.97/4.0 for the whole course. Thu is the student with the highest academic score among 22 valedictorians honored at the 40th Graduation Ceremony of Hoa Sen University.

In addition to the excellent degree, Minh Thu has won the Hoa Sen Talented Admission Scholarship and the Hoa Sen Study Encouragement Scholarship and is the champion of the female team kata content, the second runner-up of the individual female kata at Hoa Sen University in 2021 and holds a black belt in Karate martial arts.

Minh Thu has a passion for photography, especially film photography. Thu was in the top 20 of Noirfoto Contest 2022 – an annual contest dedicated to the black and white craft photography community in Vietnam. Her photo “The Fool” taken in Prague, Czech Republic is the work with the second highest number of votes in this contest.

The female student wants to pursue the tourism – restaurant – hotel industry from an early age. During a trip with her family, Thu was very impressed with the attentive and dedicated working style of the staff at the resort.

Experience the excellent service that makes the little girl feel that a strange place that has just arrived suddenly becomes familiar and warm like at home.

That impression is forever imprinted in Thu’s mind, gradually forming a habit of observing staff and overall service at each place she stops. That habit also gradually raised my love for the hotel management Major.

During her university studies, Thu did not place much emphasis on racing for grades or titles. “For me, learning and absorbing new knowledge is a process that I enjoy. I see learning as reading a book. The more good books I read, the more things I will know,” Thu shared.

To make learning more interesting, I apply some techniques like spaced repetition. This method was born based on the research of the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus.

He pointed out that we can memorize better and longer if we regularly review it at intervals. Therefore, instead of learning continuously or learning once and then not reviewing, Thu often persistently repeats the cycle: study – rest – study. When working in groups, Thu breaks down the workload and tries to finish it as soon as possible.

If the assignment is due within a month, she and her classmates usually start assigning it and start working on it from the first week. The rest of the time, the whole group uses it to review, make comments, and edit, add or solve problems that arise.

I think that there is no learning method as important as listening to lectures in class. For the hotel management major, the lecturers often expand the topic, and share real-life situations and stories.

Thu is also a student who often actively asks questions to teachers, because she feels more inspired and motivated to study after having questions answered.

Master Tran Viet Vuong, lecturer at Faculty of Hospitality, Hoa Sen University, assessed that Thu always strives to improve herself and adapt to the frequent changes of the field of study.

She is very hardworking, fully participates in class sessions, at enterprises and actively and actively participates in extracurricular programs. With the characteristics of the hospitality industries, Thu’s study program has many specialized subjects that require practical training and professional practice.

In the subject “Lobby management and accommodation management”, instead of dry classes, she and her friends directly interacted with speakers who are senior managers at famous hotels. Thu also remembers the experience of visiting four modern 5-star hotels in the center of Ho Chi Minh City when studying the subject “Tourism Overview”.

In the second year of university, Thu received a full ERASMUS+ scholarship to exchange for a semester at the Faculty of Tourism, University of Girona, Spain. However, due to the Covid-19 epidemic situation, she will not be able to set foot in Europe until 2022. Having studied in a multicultural environment, Thu took advantage of introducing the image of the country and people of Vietnam to international friends.

In the final assignment, Thu chose the topic of dark tourism in Con Dao. Following her presentation, the Spanish teacher felt very interested and then chose to travel to Vietnam.

Ms. Tran Ha Mai Ly, a PhD student at the University of the Algarve, Portugal, is the mentor of Thu’s graduation thesis. Working with Thu since her first year in a number of projects and jobs related to English teaching, Ms. Ly is impressed with her students’ initiative in work, sociable and friendly personality. She has the ability to think, analyze well, is very independent and has a high self-discipline.

Currently, Thu holds the position of Community Associate at a multinational corporation with more than 3000 branches in 120 countries around the world. I am also a part-time tutor with more than 5 years of experience in teaching English and preparing for IELTS.

Thu confided that the feeling of watching students improve their IELTS scores is as happy and proud as the feeling of helping the company’s customers solve problems. Work that is both related to education and related to services helps me realize that all professions have interference and connection with each other, as long as I have the ability to adapt.

There are many views that a bachelor’s degree in hospitality is not necessary, because whether you attend a vocational school, college or university, the starting position in the profession is the same.

According to the student, the university years help build the foundation for her to go further later. Professional skills can be gradually accumulated through job positions or assessed through tests. Although high scores have never been a prerequisite for selecting personnel in service industries, Thu believes that this is a testament to her serious attitude and efforts to achieve goals.

“Perhaps many people will laugh and say that valedictorians end up doing the diferent industry. In my opinion, besides ability, the workplace also largely depends on chance. I have twice missed applying to an island resort. But in the end, I accidentally knew the current company and the company also made a suitable offer for me to stick with,” Thu said.