By VnExpress
Publication Date: 2025-12-06 10:00:00
Four years later, the 23-year-old holds a full-time offer from Microsoft, a perfect GPA and fluency in several languages, a turnaround few could have predicted.
She received the full-time return offer from Microsoft in September 2024, just as she entered her senior year at Mount Holyoke College, a private women’s liberal arts college in South Hadley, Massachusetts, U.S. She had interned at the tech giant twice before, but her path into computer science began with confusion, exhaustion, and a crisis of confidence.
She won admission to Mount Holyoke in 2020 with financial aid covering 75% of her four-year tuition. But when Covid-19 pushed classes online, she felt the experience was not worth the cost and deferred for a gap year. She studied Chinese, read widely about geopolitics and imagined herself pursuing international relations instead.
That plan quickly fell apart. The coursework felt overly abstract, and she struggled to follow lectures.
“This was the hardest period of my life,”…
