At an awards ceremony to honor young people who have contributed to social development in various fields, including science and technology, held in Ha Noi on March 23, IT student Nguyen Phuc Hung received a tremendous ovation. He was being honored for winning a gold medal at the seventh “ASEAN Skill Contest for Web Designers” in Malaysia last year.

Nguyen Phuc Hung

Born in 1987 into a family of three children, Mr. Hung is a senior at the HCM City University of Technology’s Information Technology faculty.

When he was in 10th grade, he began to learn basic IT by himself while a cousin taught him Pascal programming language.

He joined the university in 2006.

In 2008 Mr. Hung took part in the National Skill Contest for Computer Software Programmers organized by the Ministry of Industry and Trade and duly won the first prize.

Shortly afterwards, he was nominated by the university to take part in the ASEAN contest in Malaysia.

“I had only three weeks to prepare for the contest. Since I hadn’t learned PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), a general purpose scripting language that is widely used as a tool to build websites, at school, I had to spend day and night at the faculty library to acquire as much knowledge about the language as possible before flying to Malaysia,” he recalls.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

In the same year Mr. Hung received a certificate of merit from Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and was later named the sole Vietnamese candidate at the 2009 World Skill Contest.

He was one of 10 young people feted at the Ha Noi ceremony.

Parents’ sacrifice

Mr. Hung says his achievements have been possible only because of the sacrifice made by his parents.

“My dad runs a motorbike repair shop. He was an educationally disadvantaged kid because my grandparents’ family was poor. But he is ready to sacrifice everything so that we can have a good education.”

His mother saves every dong so that the family can afford schooling for the three children.

“Since we have neither land nor money in the bank, the only thing we can rely on is knowledge, and she always encourages us to learn.”

At present, Mr. Hung is preparing for the 2009 World Skill Contest to be held in Canada next July.

As for his ambitions further down the line, he plans to set up his own IT company after graduating from university.