I want to be clear about something upfront. I am not an immigrant in the traditional sense. I came to the United States on an F-1 student visa, which means I am here to study, not to settle permanently. But the experience of arriving in a country that isn't yours, navigating systems that weren't built for you, and trying to build something real while knowing you have fewer options than the people around you, that part is familiar enough that I think it counts. I arrived in California three years ago from Vietnam, knowing functional English and very little else about how to exist here. No family nearby. No community is already waiting for me. Just a school, a dorm, and the vague plan my parents and I had put together back home that assumed everything would go according to schedule. It didn't. Not even halfway through my sophomore year, my family's business collapsed during a recession. My father's company folded. My mother's shop went under. Their income dropped from around fifty thousand dollars a year to fourteen thousand, with over two hundred thousand dollars of debt. I was sixteen, on a visa that made me ineligible for federal aid, and suddenly responsible for figuring out how to stay. I stayed. I worked summers, biked to a job nine to nine every day, saved enough to cover part of my tuition, and spent the school year applying to every scholarship I could find. What the immigrant experience taught me, or the international student experience, or whatever we want to call living in a country that is not yours with fewer resources and fewer options than the people around you, is that you stop waiting for things to get easier. You just work with what's in front of you. The career I am working toward is film and video game composition. I want to write music for the kinds of stories that made me fall in love with music in the first place, the sweeping, specific, emotionally precise soundtracks that make a moment in a game or a film feel permanent. I picked up piano at fifteen, earned a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival within two years, and have since written five original compositions. One of them, Trung Thu, was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. I am studying privately under Dr. Daniela Mineva and have participated in a masterclass with Grammy-nominated pianist Dr. Kara Huber. What I want to bring to this career specifically, and what my experience as a Vietnamese person studying abroad makes possible, is a compositional voice that pulls from Southeast Asian and Vietnamese musical traditions and brings them into mainstream entertainment. The worlds I want to score are built by diverse teams telling diverse stories. Those stories need composers who understand what it means to come from somewhere underrepresented and bring that into the work from the inside. That is not something I learned in a classroom. It is something I lived.

I almost quit piano three times before I was any good at it. I know what it feels like to sit in front of an instrument and have your hands refuse to do what your brain is telling them, to feel like everyone else in the room was born knowing something you will never figure out. That experience is why, when my music teacher asked me to become a teaching assistant for the middle school orchestra, I said yes without hesitating. I expected the work to be technical. Correcting posture, fixing rhythm, helping students read their scores, and reminding them where to put their fingers. And it was those things. But what I didn't expect was how quickly the real work revealed itself to be something else entirely. A few weeks into the role, I was sitting in on rehearsal when I noticed a student named Devin at the piano. He had been struggling with the same passage for a while, and you could see it wearing on him. Not the frustrated kind of struggling that means someone is trying hard. The defeated kind, where the body goes quiet, and the hands stop moving, and the person just sits there, present in the room but somewhere else entirely. He sighed and said he couldn't do it. Not to me specifically. Just out loud, to no one, the way people do when they've run out of options. I sat down next to him. I didn't immediately correct anything or run through the theory or tell him what he was doing wrong. I just sat there for a second. Then I told him that when I started piano at fifteen, I couldn't play with both hands separately, let alone together. That was the first time I tried to read sheet music; it looked like someone had spilled a bag of symbols onto a page and called it information. That I had felt exactly what he was feeling, in that same room, not very long ago. Then we broke the passage into shorter phrases. Just the first two measures. Slowly. No pressure on what came next. He played it. It wasn't perfect, but it moved, and that was enough to keep going. At the concert, he played the whole piece. It wasn't flawless. There were a couple of moments where I could see him recalibrate mid-phrase. But he didn't stop. He played it to the end,d and when he finished, ed he looked up with this expression that I recognized immediately because I had felt it myself, the specific relief of getting through something you weren't sure you could get through. That moment changed how I understand what it means to help someone. I had gone into the role thinking my job was to transfer knowledge. Fix the technical problems, improve the gameplay, and raise the level. What I learned is that the technical problems are usually the last thing standing in the way. The first thing is always the same. Someone has to sit down next to you and make the distance between where you are and where you want to be feel crossable. That's what Devin needed. It's what I had needed to. Helping someone in need, I found out, usually starts with just being honest about when you were in the same place.

My first language is Vietnamese. My second is English. My third, if you count it, is music, which has no native speakers and no grammar rules that anyone fully agrees on, which is probably why I like it so much. I grew up in Vietnam speaking Vietnamese at home, at school, and everywhere else. English existed as a subject I studied, not a language I lived in. When I came to the US three years ago for high school, that changed overnight. Suddenly, every class, every conversation, every joke I didn't quite catch, every form I had to fill out, every phone call I had to make about my own tuition, all of it was in a language I was still learning to think in. That's the part people don't warn you about. It's not the vocabulary or the grammar. It's that you spend years being a sharp, funny, fully formed person in one language, and then you arrive somewhere new and become a quieter, slower, more careful version of yourself while your brain catches up. The challenge of being bilingual isn't really about the language. It's about the person you are in each one. In Vietnamese, I'm faster, looser, and more confident in my humor. In English, I'm more deliberate, which has made me a better writer but a slower talker. What I've gained is the ability to move between two entirely different ways of understanding the world. Vietnamese is a tonal language where meaning shifts with pitch. English is a language where word order carries most of the weight. Growing up between them has made me more sensitive to how meaning is constructed, which turns out to be directly useful for composing music, where you're constantly making decisions about how to shape something so it lands the way you intend. The benefit nobody talks about is the cultural access. Being bilingual isn't just about speaking two languages. It's about having two sets of references, two libraries of context, two ways of framing a problem. When I compose, I can pull from Vietnamese folk traditions and understand them from the inside, not as an observer borrowing something exotic, but as someone who grew up with it. That's a different kind of access. It shows in the music. After graduation, I want to compose for video games and film professionally. I want to write music that pulls from Vietnamese and Southeast Asian cultural traditions and brings them into mainstream entertainment. The bilingual experience is directly connected to that goal. I've spent three years learning to exist between two languages and two cultures without fully belonging to either one, which sounds like a loss but is actually a kind of freedom. You stop assuming your way of seeing things is the default. You start noticing what each language captures that the other one can't. That gap, the untranslatable stuff, is where the most interesting music lives. My first language gave me a way of hearing the world. My second gave me the tools to explain it to people who hear it differently. What I'm building now is the third thing, the music that lives between both.

"At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain about, if I'm going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? So you were born to feel 'nice'? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don't you see the plants, the birds, the ants, spiders, and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you're not willing to do your work as a human being? Why aren't you running to do what your nature demands?" — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book V, Section 1 ______________________________________________________________________________________________ Marcus Aurelius did not write the Meditations to be published. He wrote them to himself, in private, as a series of arguments against his own laziness, self-pity, and desire for comfort. That context is everything. When Aurelius asks why he is not running to do what his nature demands, he is not lecturing the reader. He is lecturing himself, a Roman emperor, one of the most powerful men in the world, who apparently still had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. The underlying meaning of this passage is not simply that discipline is virtuous. It is that the impulse toward comfort is universal, that even the greatest among us feel it, and that the only answer is to return, every single morning, to the question of what you were made for. The thesis of this passage is embedded in a single rhetorical move. Aurelius shifts from the personal "I" to the natural world, pointing at plants, birds, ants, spiders, and bees going about their individual tasks without complaint. This is not a coincidence. He is using nature as a mirror. These creatures do not ask whether their work is pleasant. They do not negotiate with themselves about whether today is a good day to build the hive or carry the grain. They simply do what their nature demands because that is the only mode available to them. Aurelius is arguing that human beings, despite our capacity for reflection and self-awareness, are not exempt from this same obligation. If anything, our ability to reason makes the failure to act more inexcusable, not less. The plants don't have the option of choosing comfort. We do, and Aurelius thinks choosing it is a betrayal of what we are. What makes this passage remarkable is its honesty about struggle. Aurelius is not writing from a position of effortless discipline. He is writing from the bed, from the warm blankets, from the exact moment of temptation he is arguing against. The question "So you were born to feel nice?" is not a triumphant declaration. It is a challenge he is posing to himself because he needs it. This is a man talking himself into getting up. The underlying meaning is not that great people never feel the pull of comfort. It is that great people argue back against it, every single morning, for their entire lives. This is the part of ancient philosophy that tends to get lost in translation. People read the Stoics and assume they were describing a kind of cold, unfeeling detachment from difficulty. What Aurelius is actually describing is the opposite. He feels the difficulty. He just refuses to let it be the final word. The passage is an act of daily recommitment to purpose, not a statement that purpose comes easily. The question "why aren't you running to do what your nature demands" has stayed with me because it reframes discipline entirely. It is not about punishment or willpower. It is about identity. If you know what you were made for, then not doing it is not laziness. It is a kind of self-betrayal. Aurelius understood that the hardest battle is not the one fought in public, against visible opponents, but the one fought in private, before anyone else is awake, against the part of yourself that would rather stay warm. He wrote this passage to win that battle. The fact that he apparently needed to write it more than once tells you everything about how hard that battle actually is, and how much it matters to keep fighting it anyway. I chose this passage because I have lived it in a specific and unglamorous way. I am a Vietnamese student studying abroad in the United States on an F-1 visa, partially funding my own education after my family's business collapsed during a recession. I picked up piano at fifteen with no prior experience and practiced four hours a day because I knew, with a clarity that surprised me, that composing music was what I was made for. There were mornings when that felt absurd. When the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be felt too large to cross. When burning out felt like a signal to stop rather than a reason to recalibrate. Aurelius's question is the one I kept coming back to on those mornings. Not as inspiration, exactly, but as an argument. You know what you were made for. Why aren't you running toward it? It is a harder question than it looks. It is also, I think, the only one worth asking.

Before I came to the US, my plan was simple. Study hard, find a stable job, and make my parents proud. That was what success looked like where I grew up in Vietnam. Nobody in my world talked about passion or purpose. You worked, you survived, you provided. I didn't question it until I discovered video game soundtracks and realized that someone, somewhere, had built an entire career out of making people feel things through music. That realization changed everything. I picked up the piano at fifteen with no prior experience. Got humbled immediately. But I was obsessed, and obsession made me practice. Four hours a day, every day. I had a rival at school who treated music like a casual hobby and was somehow better at it than I, the one who actually wanted it as a career. It made no sense, and it drove me crazy. So I locked in harder than I ever had. My skills went from never touching a piano before age fifteen to winning a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival within two years. I started composing. A piece I wrote about Vietnam's Mid-Autumn Festival, Trung Thu, was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. None of that was the plan. I just kept chasing whatever sound was stuck in my head. Then I burned out. Senior year, piano felt mechanical and composing felt pointless, and I genuinely didn't know why I was doing any of it. My piano teacher kept telling me I was playing like a robot. One night, I called my mother in Vietnam and finally told her how I felt. She said they didn't care if I failed, as long as I was happy and knew I'd given everything. I cried. Then I went back to the reason I started. Anime soundtracks. The feeling of hearing something so specifically crafted that it made a moment permanent in your memory. I reconnected with that, and everything opened back up. Education has given me the direction that my old plan never could. Before studying in the US, I was a kid who had one friend and spent all his time on homework and video games. Coming here gave me music, community, competition, and the chance to find out who I actually was. I founded my school's first volleyball club. I volunteered at the Betty Kwan Chinn Day Center every week for three years. I served as a teaching assistant for the middle school orchestra. I performed at state festivals. I had a university orchestra play my composition. None of that happens if I stay in Vietnam following the safe path. The biggest challenge I've had to overcome came halfway through my sophomore year. My family's business collapsed during a recession. My father's company folded. My mother's shop went under. Their income dropped from around fifty thousand dollars a year to fourteen thousand, with over two hundred thousand dollars of debt. I was already studying abroad on an F-1 visa, which meant no federal aid and no safety net. They told me to figure something out or come home. I chose to stay. I biked to work nine to nine every day that summer, saved enough to cover part of my tuition, and spent the school year applying to every scholarship I could find. What I learned from that experience is something I couldn't have learned any other way. When there is no backup plan, you stop wasting time. Every hour, every practice session, every application had a real cost attached to it. That clarity is something I carry into everything I do now. My goal is to compose for video games and film professionally. Not as a side project. As a career. I want to write music that pulls from Vietnamese and Southeast Asian cultural traditions and brings them into mainstream entertainment in a way that makes people from those backgrounds feel like their stories belong in these worlds. The music industry has historically been dominated by Western sounds and Western stories. I want to be part of changing that, one score at a time. The future I'm working toward isn't just about my own success. I want to teach. I want to mentor young composers from underrepresented backgrounds who don't see people like them in the industry and don't know the path is real and walkable. I've already started in a small way, sitting next to struggling students as a teaching assistant and reminding them that starting from nothing doesn't mean ending with nothing. That's a lesson I know from experience. Education didn't give me a path. It gave me the tools to build one. The stable job plan my old self had mapped out would have kept me safe and kept me small. The path I'm on now is harder, less certain, and the only one I could have actually followed. I'm not in a hurry. I just have no intention of stopping.

I never thought music would make me hate someone so much. It wasn't enjoyable seeing someone so chill about music be so good at it. Meanwhile, I wanted to make music my career. No choice either way. I needed to prove to my parents that this fantasy could genuinely happen, especially when they'd sacrificed everything to have me here during a recession, struggling to meet half my tuition. Before meeting this guy, I practiced two hours a day. That all changed when he showed up and dazzled everyone with his perfect pitch and improvisation skills. "Eh, I want to be a composer, so piano isn't something I need to worry about," I convinced myself. Then, a few days later, he showed me a symphony arrangement he did "last night." That's it, game on. From that moment, the music room became my home: Four hours of piano every day, with one hour of composing; Anything that stopped me from progress was a hindrance, from my friends' invitations to play sports, to my family's many attempts to FaceTime me. I was addicted to leveling up; my skills went from never touching a piano before age 15 to winning a Silver medal at my state's Solo Ensemble Festival on piano during my junior year. But was that enough? No, piano is critical, but composing is my life. A silver medal didn't satisfy me; I craved more, and I still do. Even in my senior year, after my rival graduated, college auditions were next. By then, it's 4 hours of piano and 2 hours of composing every day, and doubling up on composing on the weekends. I wanted to make this work; failure was unacceptable. Then suddenly, I hit a roadblock. Piano felt like a chore; I didn't know what I was missing, and composing wasn't fun anymore. I felt awful. One day, after barely writing anything during 4 hours of composing, I questioned myself. "Is this what I truly want? Is this life of constantly hating myself and feeling burned out what I have wished for all these years? Am I even having fun?" I thought of my piano teacher's latest advice: "Feel the music, Nhan, you're playing as though every note is the same. You're not a robot." I pondered those words for a bit before my phone rang; it was my mother in Vietnam. I explained my issues to her, and after 2 years, I finally told her how I felt. "We don't mind you failing, as long as you know you've done your best and are happy, that's all that counts." I never thought I'd cry hearing those words. I still genuinely love playing and making music. It took me a while to finally figure out something that my old rival knew all this time, the one thing that made him different from me, and the reason why his playing always seemed so annoyingly effortless: Fun was the final variable I needed. Don't get me wrong—I'm grateful to my past self for maintaining such a consistent work ethic—but now, to evolve further, I needed to go back to my curious self, back to the reason why I loved piano so much, back to when I first discovered the musical magic behind anime. Reconnecting my critical, analytical, and hardworking side with the gleeful, curious, and gaming-inspired musical superfan I was was what was missing, because, at my core, both sides are me.

I grew up in Vietnam in a family that valued hard work and quiet sacrifice. My parents built their lives through small businesses, my mother with a cosmetics shop, my father with a commerce warehouse. They weren't wealthy, but they were stable, and when the opportunity came to send me abroad to study in the United States, they took it without hesitation. That decision cost them more than I understood at the time. What inspired me to pursue higher education in the US wasn't a grand plan. It was a video game soundtrack. Sitting in Vietnam with nothing but homework and cram school, I discovered that the music behind the games I loved was composed by real people who had studied their craft, traveled the world, and built careers out of something most people dismissed as entertainment. Kevin Penkin, an Australian composer known for his work on Made in Abyss, was the one who made it concrete for me. His music pulled from Southeast Asian traditions, blended them with orchestral and electronic elements, and came out sounding like nothing else. I looked him up and found out he went to a serious music school. That was enough. I knew what I wanted, and I knew the US had the programs to get me there. The challenge I had to overcome came fast. Not even halfway through my sophomore year, I found out my family's finances had collapsed. The recession hit them hard. My father's company folded. My mother's shop went under. Their income dropped from around fifty thousand dollars a year to fourteen thousand, with over two hundred thousand in debt. I was sixteen, on an F-1 visa, with no access to federal aid. They told me to figure something out or come home. I chose to stay. I biked to work every day that summer from nine in the morning to nine at night, saved enough to cover part of my tuition, and spent the school year applying to every scholarship I could find. What I learned from that experience is that clarity comes from having no backup plan. When there is no safety net, you stop wasting time. The person who has inspired me most isn't a famous composer or a public figure. It's my music director at St. Bernard's Academy. She is the most genuinely passionate educator I have ever watched work. She saw potential in me before I had earned it, pushed me into competitions I didn't know existed, and made me her teaching assistant when she recognized my work ethic. Watching her show up every single day with that level of energy and conviction changed how I understand what it means to care about something. She is part of the reason I stayed in the US when going home would have been easier. After I graduate, I want to compose for video games and film professionally. I want to write music that pulls from Vietnamese and Southeast Asian cultural traditions and brings them into mainstream entertainment in a way that makes people from those backgrounds feel like their stories belong in these worlds. I have already started. My composition Trung Thu was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. College is where I learn to do this at scale, with the training, the connections, and the opportunities to have my work heard by people who can move it forward. That is the plan. I intend to follow it.

I never thought music would make me hate someone so much. It wasn't enjoyable seeing someone so chill about music be so good at it. Meanwhile, I wanted to make music my career. No choice either way. I needed to prove to my parents this fantasy could genuinely happen, especially when they'd sacrificed everything for me to be here during a recession, struggling to meet half my tuition. Before meeting this guy, I practiced two hours a day. That all changed when he showed up and dazzled everyone with his perfect pitch and improvisation skills. "Eh, I want to be a composer, so piano isn't something I need to worry about," I convinced myself. Then, days later, he showed me a symphony arrangement he did "last night." That's it, game on. From that moment, the music room became my home: Four hours of piano every day, with one hour of composing; Anything that stopped me from progress was a hindrance, from my friends' invitations to play sports, to my family's many attempts to FaceTime me. I was addicted to leveling up; my skills went from never touching a piano before age 15 to winning a Silver medal at my state's Solo Ensemble Festival on piano during my junior year. But was that enough? No, piano is critical, but composing is my life. A silver medal didn't satisfy me; I craved more, and I still do. Even in my senior year, after my rival graduated, college auditions were next. By then, it's 4 hours of piano and 2 hours of composing every day, and doubling up on composing on the weekends. I wanted to make this work; failure was unacceptable. Then suddenly, I hit a roadblock. Piano felt like a chore; I didn't know what I was missing, and composing wasn't fun anymore. I felt awful. One day, after barely writing anything during 4 hours of composing, I questioned myself. "Is this what I truly want? Is this life of constantly hating myself and feeling burned out what I have wished for all these years? Am I even having fun?" I thought of my piano teacher's latest advice: "Feel the music, Nhan, you're playing as though every note is the same. You're not a robot." I pondered those words for a bit before my phone rang; it was my mother in Vietnam. I explained my issues to her, and after 2 years, I finally told her how I felt. "We don't mind you failing, as long as you know you've done your best and are happy, that's all that counts." I never thought I'd cry hearing those words. I still genuinely love playing and making music. It took me a while to finally figure out something that my old rival knew all this time, the one thing that made him different from me, and the reason why his playing always seemed so annoyingly effortless: Fun was the final variable I needed. Don't get me wrong—I'm grateful to my past self for maintaining such a consistent work ethic—but now, to evolve further, I needed to go back to my curious self, back to the reason why I loved piano so much, back to when I first discovered the musical magic behind anime. Reconnecting my critical, analytical, and hardworking side with the gleeful, curious, and gaming-inspired musical superfan I was was what was missing, because, at my core, both sides are me.

I've been partially funding my own education since I was sixteen. Not because I wanted to, but because the alternative was going home and closing a door I wasn't ready to close. Before I left Vietnam, my family had a plan. My mother owned a thriving cosmetics shop. My father ran a commerce warehouse he'd just upgraded, leasing it for ten years, expecting growth. Then the recession hit. His company folded. Her shop collapsed under its debt. Their income dropped from around fifty thousand dollars a year to fourteen thousand, with over two hundred thousand dollars of debt on top of that. I was already studying abroad in the US on an F-1 visa, which meant no federal aid, no work-study, no safety net. They told me to figure something out or come home. I stayed. I biked to work nine to nine every day that summer, saved enough to cover part of my tuition, and spent the school year applying to every scholarship I could find. That became the pattern. Work, apply, practice, repeat. It's exhausting, and I wouldn't trade it because of what it taught me about what I actually want and why I actually want it. What I want is to compose for video games and film. Not as a side project or a backup plan. As a career. I want to write music that makes someone pause mid-gameplay and just sit in the feeling, the kind of soundtrack that pulls from real cultural traditions and makes people feel like their stories belong in these worlds. I picked up piano at fifteen with no prior experience, earned a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival within two years, and have since written five original compositions. One of them, Trung Thu, was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. I've been studying privately under Dr. Daniela Mineva and participated in a masterclass with Grammy-nominated pianist Dr. Kara Huber. Every one of those things happened while I was also working and funding my own education. None of it happened because the circumstances were favorable. Higher education is the next necessary step because composition at a professional level requires training I can't give myself. Music theory at the university level, orchestration, film scoring techniques, industry connections, collaborative experience with game designers and filmmakers. These are things I can study on YouTube up to a point. That point has limits. A composition program gives me access to faculty who have worked in the industry, peers who are building the same kinds of careers, and opportunities to have my work heard by people who can actually move it forward. It also gives me the credentials that open doors in a field where doors don't open easily without them. The positive impact I'm working toward is specific. I want to bring underrepresented cultural voices into mainstream entertainment music. Vietnamese folk tradition in a film score. Southeast Asian instrumentation in a game soundtrack. The worlds I want to score are built by diverse teams telling diverse stories, and those stories need composers who actually understand what it means to come from somewhere that rarely gets represented. I'm already doing this. Trung Thu was my attempt to put Vietnam's Mid-Autumn Festival into a concert hall. It worked. College is where I learn to do it at scale. I've also spent three years volunteering at the Betty Kwan Chinn Day Center, delivering food to families in need every week. I served as a teaching assistant for my school's middle school orchestra. I founded my school's first volleyball club. I'm not waiting until I've made it to give back. I'm doing it now with whatever I have. Higher education is how I get more to give.

My parents are still together. But for three years, I've been living on the other side of the world from both of them, watching their finances collapse through a phone screen while trying to keep my own life from falling apart. Before I left Vietnam, we had a plan. Then the recession hit. My father's company folded. My mother's shop collapsed under its debt. Their income dropped from around fifty thousand dollars a year to fourteen thousand, with over two hundred thousand in debt on top of that. I was sixteen, on an F-1 visa, with tuition due and no federal aid available to me. They gave me a choice. Figure something out or come home. I chose to stay. I biked to work nine to nine every day that summer, saved enough to cover part of my tuition, and applied to every scholarship I could find during the school year. Nobody was going to catch me if I fell. That clarity turned out to be one of the most useful things that ever happened to me. It taught me that wasted time has a real cost. I went from never touching a piano before age fifteen to winning a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival. I had a composition performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra. I volunteer weekly at the Betty Kwan Chinn Day Center. I founded my school's first volleyball club. None of it happened because things were easy. The positive impact I want to make starts with what I'm already doing, sitting next to struggling students as a teaching assistant and reminding them that starting from nothing doesn't mean ending with nothing. I know that from experience. I intend to keep proving it.

The social norm I grew up with was simple: study hard, get a stable job, retire. That was the whole plan. Not because anyone was cruel about it, just because that was what success looked like in the environment I came from. Nobody talked about passion or purpose or making a difference. You worked, you survived, you provided. That was enough. I couldn't do it. Not because I was rebellious, but because I had already seen something different. Video game soundtracks from composers who pulled from every corner of the world and blended them into something that made people feel things they didn't have words for. That was the life I wanted. And the social norm that said stick to something safe, something proven, something your parents understand, that norm was the first thing I had to push against. Pushing against it had a cost. My family's business collapsed during a recession while I was already studying abroad in the US. I had to work summers biking nine to nine just to pay part of my own tuition. I had to apply to every scholarship I could find while keeping up with practice, composing, volunteering, and school. The easy path would have been going home. The norm would have been going home. I stayed. I see myself as a positive force in society through what I make and what I pass on. My composition Trung Thu, written about Vietnam's Mid-Autumn Festival, was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. That piece exists because I believed a Vietnamese cultural tradition deserved to be heard in a concert hall. That's a small act of resistance against the norm that says certain cultures belong in certain spaces and not others. I've also spent three years volunteering at the Betty Kwan Chinn Day Center, delivering food to families in need every week. And I served as a teaching assistant for my school's middle school orchestra, working with students who were struggling and close to quitting. Both of those things came from the same instinct: that showing up consistently for other people, with whatever you have, is one of the most straightforward ways to be useful in the world. The social norm that shapes my thinking most right now is the one that says creative careers aren't serious. That music is a hobby, not a livelihood. That a kid from Vietnam with no connections and no safety net has no business trying to compose for film and video games. I've been living proof against that norm for three years, and I intend to keep going. The more composers there are from backgrounds like mine making work that reflects where they come from, the more that the norm erodes. That's the positive force I'm building toward. Not dramatic, not overnight. Just one piece at a time, one student at a time, one sandwich delivery at a time.

I was probably a bum. Video games were what I was glued to for most of my childhood, and honestly, how could I not be? School in Vietnam was just homework, then cram school, then more homework. So yeah, I gravitated hard toward the freedom and color that games offered. Extensive lore, wild characters, and these soundtracks that somehow made me feel things I didn't have words for yet. That's when it clicked. Someone made that music. Someone sat down and wrote it. And I wanted to be that person. What got me wasn't just that the music was beautiful. It was its versatility. A dying world full of monsters gets solemn guitars and hopeful choirs. A fantasy kingdom built on real-world cultures gets melodies pulled from corners of the earth I'd never visited. There were no rules, no ceiling. That kind of freedom felt like the opposite of everything I knew growing up, and I wanted to live inside it. So I picked up the piano at fifteen. Never touched one before that. Got humbled immediately, which was fine, because getting humbled just made me angry, and being angry made me practice. Four hours a day, every day. I had a rival who treated music like a casual hobby and was somehow better at it than I, the one who wanted it as a career. It drove me crazy enough to lock in harder than I ever had. Within two years, I went from struggling with both hands separately to winning a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival. A composition I wrote about Vietnam's Mid-Autumn Festival, Trung Thu, was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. None of that was the plan. I just kept chasing whatever sound was stuck in my head. The grind caught up with me, though. In my senior year, I hit a wall where composing felt like a chore and piano felt mechanical. My mom called from Vietnam, and I finally told her how I felt. She said they didn't care if I failed, as long as I was happy and knew I'd given everything. I cried. Then I remembered why I started. Anime soundtracks. That feeling of hearing something so specifically crafted for a moment that it made the scene permanent in your memory. I went back to that, and everything opened back up. That's what I want to give people. Not just technically impressive music. Music that makes a moment stick. I want to blend the musical languages I've been collecting, Vietnamese folk, classical structure, jazz spontaneity, and anime drama, into something that feels new but familiar at the same time. Something that tells people their culture and their stories are worth being heard in a concert hall, a game engine, or a film score. I'm Vietnamese, and I grew up in a country that doesn't always get represented in the worlds I love most. Trung Thu was my small attempt to change that. One piece performed in a Sacramento convention center lobby, heard by people who had never thought about Vietnam's Mid-Autumn Festival before. That's a small impact. But it's real, and it showed me what's possible when you commit to writing music that comes from somewhere specific. The world doesn't need more music that sounds like everything else. It needs composers who bring something irreplaceable to the table. I know where I'm from, I know what I've survived, and I know what I want to say. I'm just getting started saying it.

My goal is straightforward: study composition at a university with a strong music program and come out the other side with the skills, portfolio, and connections to compose professionally for video games and film. My professional goal is to write the kind of music that makes someone pause mid-gameplay and just sit in the feeling. The kind of soundtrack that stays with you long after the screen goes dark. That's the target. Everything I do academically is pointed at it. The path there has been anything but straight. I picked up piano at fifteen with no prior experience, earned a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival within two years, and have since written five original compositions ranging from small ensembles to full symphonic works. One of them, Trung Thu, was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. I've been studying privately under Dr. Daniela Mineva, an award-winning concert pianist, and participated in a masterclass with Grammy-nominated pianist Dr. Kara Huber. Every one of those experiences was something I had to chase down, not something that landed in my lap. Giving back started closer to home than I expected. My music teacher recognized my work ethic early and brought me on as her teaching assistant for the middle school orchestra. I worked with students on violin and piano, correcting technique, helping them read scores, and fixing rhythm. But what I actually spent most of my time doing was sitting next to kids who were one bad rehearsal away from quitting and reminding them that struggling at the beginning doesn't mean you don't belong. I knew exactly what that felt like because I had felt it myself. One student, Devin, sat at the piano during rehearsal, unable to play a passage he'd been stuck on for weeks. I sat next to him, broke it into shorter phrases, and asked him to play slowly. At the concert, he played the whole piece. That moment stuck with me more than any medal I've won. I've also spent three years volunteering at the Betty Chinn Day Center in Eureka, preparing and delivering food to families in need every week alongside friends. It's a simple thing on paper. PB&J sandwiches, carefully wrapped, packed into boxes, handed to people who are having a harder time than I am. But I've learned that consistency is its own form of care. Showing up every week, the same faces, the same boxes, the same small act repeated until it becomes something people can count on. That's not glamorous. It matters anyway. What all of it has taught me is that giving back isn't something you do after you've made it. It's something you do with whatever you have right now. I'm a high school student with limited money, limited time, and a lot of ambition. What I have to offer is my skill, my time, and the specific knowledge of what it feels like to start from nothing and keep going anyway. That's what I gave Devin. That's what I give every week at the Day Center. And that's what I want to scale up as my career grows: more compositions rooted in cultures, more mentorship for young musicians who don't see people like them, and proof that the path from nowhere to somewhere is real. The world I want to contribute to is one where a kid in Vietnam can hear a video game soundtrack and recognize something of their own culture in it. I'm working on that. One piece at a time.

I never thought music would make me hate someone so much. It wasn't enjoyable seeing someone who was so chill about music be so good at it. Meanwhile, I wanted to make music my career. No choice either way, I need to make this work, to prove to my parents that this fantasy of mine could genuinely happen, especially when they've sacrificed everything for me to be here, during a recession, when they struggle even to meet half of my tuition. And to think someone who treats music as a hobby is better than me? That didn't make sense to me back then. Am I not the one who wants to make this into a living reality? Before meeting this guy, I practiced two hours a day and did my best on the tasks my music teachers assigned. That all changed when this new face showed up and dazzled everyone with his perfect pitch and his improvisation skills. "Eh, I want to be a composer, so piano isn't something I need to worry about," I convinced myself, trying to look cool in front of everyone. Then, days later, he came by and showed me a symphony arrangement he did "last night." That's it, I'd had enough, you've crossed the line, game on. From that moment, the music room became my home: Four hours of piano every day, with one hour of composing; Anything that stopped me from progress was a hindrance, from my friends' invitations to play sports, to my family's many attempts to FaceTime me. I was addicted to leveling up; my skills went from never touching a piano before age 15 to winning a Silver medal at my state's Solo Ensemble Festival on piano during my junior year. But was that enough? No, piano is critical, but composing is my life. A silver medal didn't satisfy me; I craved more, and I still do. Even in my senior year, after my rival graduated, college auditions were next. By then, it's 4 hours of piano and 2 hours of composing every day, doubling up on weekends. I wanted to make this work; failure was unacceptable. Then suddenly I hit a roadblock. Piano felt like a chore, and composing wasn't fun anymore. I felt awful. One day, I questioned myself. "Is this what I truly want? Is this life of constantly hating myself what I wished for?" I thought of my piano teacher's advice: "Feel the music, Nhan. You're not a robot." Then my phone rang; it was my mother in Vietnam. After 2 years, I finally told her how I felt. "We don't mind you failing, as long as you know you've done your best and are happy, that's all that counts." I never thought I'd cry hearing those words. Fun was the final variable I needed. I needed to go back to my curious self, back to when I first discovered the musical magic behind anime. At my core, both sides are me. My dream is to compose professionally for video games and film. Getting there means college, and college means funding I don't have on my own. As a Vietnamese national on an F-1 visa, federal aid isn't available to me. My family's income dropped from around fifty thousand dollars a year to fourteen thousand after a recession hit them while I was already studying abroad. I've been partially funding my own education since my sophomore year, working summers and applying to every scholarship I could find. This scholarship is not just money. It's another semester of possibility. It's proof that the path I chose, staying instead of going home, was the right one.

She never let me get away with anything. Not in a harsh way. In the way that people who genuinely believe in you refuse to let you settle. My music director at St. Bernard's Academy is the reason I'm still here, still playing, still composing, and still in the United States at all. That's not an exaggeration. When I arrived at St. Bernard's, I was a kid who had played organ at a Vietnamese church for three years and thought that was enough of a foundation to build something on. She saw potential I hadn't earned yet and decided to invest in it anyway. She pointed me toward competitions I didn't know existed, pushed me into ensembles that were above my level. When my family's finances collapsed during my sophomore year and going back to Vietnam became a real possibility, she was part of the reason staying made sense. The music program she ran wasn't just good. It was worth fighting to stay in. What she changed about how I approach my life is harder to explain than a list of opportunities she opened. It's more about what she modeled. She is, without question, the most energetic and passionate person I have ever watched work. Not performatively, not for show. Just genuinely, consistently, unreasonably excited about what music can do for a person. Watching someone operate like that every single day does something to you. It makes laziness feel embarrassing. It makes a half-effort feel like a betrayal of something. She recognized my work ethic early and made me her teaching assistant, which meant tutoring her students on violin and piano. That decision changed me as much as any competition or performance. Standing on the other side of the lesson, trying to help a kid who was one frustrating rehearsal away from quitting, I understood for the first time that music isn't just something you get better at. It's something you pass on. The way she passed it on to me. When I hit burnout my senior year and couldn't figure out what was missing, her words kept coming back to me. Feel the music. You're not a robot. Simple words. But she'd been saying them for years, and I finally heard them. I don't know what kind of composer I'll become. But I know the kind of teacher she showed me it was possible to be. And I know that whoever I end up passing this on to someday, I want to do it with half the energy and conviction she brought to it every single day. That's a high bar. I'm okay with that.

I started playing piano at fifteen. Never touched one before that. For most people, that's too late to take seriously, and honestly, for the first few months, I wondered if they were right. They weren't. Before piano,o I played organ for three years at a Vietnamese church, covering masses, weddings, funerals, and special occasions twice a week minimum. It gave me a foundation I didn't fully appreciate until I sat down at a piano and realized I already understood how to listen. Within two years of serious piano study,y I went to the State for the CMEA Solo and Small Ensemble Festival and received a Silver medal. This year, my goal is Gold. Alongside piano, I play violin and viola in orchestral settings. I performed as an orchestral violinist and pianist for the NCCMEA All-Region Music Festival, comprising the region's best players. I also had the chance to spend a week with the Arianna String Quartet for an outreach concert, performing for over 300 people and improving my violin skills more in that week than in months of solo practice. Composing started about a year ago. My third original composition, Trung Thu, was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. I've since written five original compositions total, ranging from small ensembles to full symphonic works, and I'm still going. My music teacher recognized my work ethic and brought me on as her teaching assistant, where I tutored students on violin and piano. Working with kids, navigating their own early struggles with music, watching them push through frustration and get it, reminded me why I started in the first place. Privately, I've been studying under Dr. Daniela Mineva, an award-winning concert pianist, working through repertoire that ranges from Bach and Haydn to Chopin and Shostakovich. I also participated in a masterclass with Grammy-nominated pianist and conductor Dr. Kara Huber, where I received feedback on my musicality and dynamics that changed how I approach every piece I sit down to learn. After completing my degree,e I want to compose for video games and film. Not as a backup plan or a side career. As the thing. I want to write music that makes someone pause mid-gameplay and just sit in the feeling, the kind of soundtrack that stays with you long after the screen goes dark. The path to that is clear to me. Keep composing, keep performing, keep learning every musical language I can get my hands on. I'm not in a hurry. I just have no intention of stopping.

I grew up in a country where the music I heard every day was beautiful but narrow. Vietnamese boleros and ballads, mostly about love, mostly in the same styles passed down for generations. The music that actually grabbed me was coming from somewhere else entirely, from video game soundtracks that pulled from every corner of the world and blended them into something new. That's when I understood that music could be a door, not just a tradition. That's the impact I want to make. I want to open doors. Video game and film composition is where I'm headed, and the reason isn't just that I love the craft. These are the most widely consumed storytelling platforms on earth right now. A soundtrack that draws from Vietnamese folk tradition or Southeast Asian instrumentation tells someone from that culture that their world is worth being in a game. That their stories belong on a screen. That matters beyond aesthetics. My composition Trung Thu was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. People who had never heard of Trung Thu listened to it in a convention center lobby and got a glimpse of what that festival feels like from the inside. That's a small impact. But it's real. I also want to teach. I was a teaching assistant for my school's middle school orchestra, working with kids one bad rehearsal away from quitting. If I can help young composers from underrepresented backgrounds understand that this career is real and reachable, that their cultural background is an asset, not an obstacle, that's an impact I can make right now. The world doesn't need more music that sounds like everything else. I know where I'm from, I know what I've survived, and I know what I want to say. I'm just getting started saying it.

Whiplash scared me because I recognized myself in it. Not Fletcher, the conductor who throws chairs and screams and breaks people down to see what's left. I recognized myself in Andrew, the drummer who wants it so badly he can't tell anymore whether the wanting is healthy or not. I watched that movie and felt genuinely uncomfortable in a way that took me a while to understand. It wasn't fiction to me. It was a mirror. I picked up the piano at fifteen with no prior experience and immediately became obsessed. I had a rival at school who played effortlessly, treated music like a casual hobby, and was somehow better than me, the one who wanted it as a career. It made no sense, and it drove me crazy. So I did what Andrew does. I'm locked in. Four hours of piano every day, two hours of composing, cutting off friends, missing family FaceTime calls, and treating anything that wasn't progress as a waste. I was addicted to leveling up in exactly the way the movie shows you, which is dangerous. What Whiplash gets right that most music movies don't is the cost. Not just the physical cost, the bleeding hands and the collapsed relationships, but the psychological ones. The way obsession starts to feel like identity. The way you stop being able to tell the difference between discipline and self-destruction. Fletcher's most chilling line isn't any of the ones where he's screaming. It's when he calmly explains that the two most harmful words in the English language are "good job." I understood that instinct completely. I had internalized it about myself before I ever saw the movie. But here's where my story diverges from Andrew's, and it's the part Whiplash doesn't quite get to. I burned out. Completely. Piano felt mechanical, composing felt pointless, and one night I called my mother in Vietnam and finally admitted I wasn't okay. She said something I wasn't expecting. She said they didn't care if I failed, as long as I was happy and knew I'd given everything. I cried. And then something shifted. Fletcher's method assumes that greatness only comes from suffering, that you have to be broken to be brilliant. I don't think that's true anymore. My rival, the one who drove me insane, played the way he did because he was genuinely having fun. That effortlessness I hated wasn't laziness. It was joy. And joy, it turns out, is not the enemy of excellence. It's what makes excellence sustainable. Whiplash is a great film because it asks a real question and doesn't flinch from how ugly the answer can get. But I think it stops one step short. It shows you what happens when you chase greatness at any cost. What it doesn't show you is what happens when you learn to chase it without destroying yourself in the process. That's the part I'm still figuring out. And honestly, that's a more interesting movie to me now than the one I watched.

Nobody asked me to start a volleyball club. No teacher was pushing me, no community initiative behind it, no credit attached to it. I just noticed that a group of international students at my school, most of us far from home, had nowhere to belong after class. So I built something. St. Bernard's Academy didn't have a boys' volleyball club. I founded one from scratch, scheduled the auditorium for scrimmages twice a week, and organized a school-wide tournament open to every class. The early days were rough. Volleyball wasn't popular in our area, and most days only four or five people showed up before drifting off to play something else. I kept showing up anyway. I kept inviting people. Slowly, it grew into something real, a space where students who didn't fit neatly into existing social groups could show up, compete, laugh, and belong. What I didn't fully realize at the time was who was showing up. Mostly international students, mostly kids navigating a country and a culture that wasn't theirs, mostly people who were working twice as hard as everyone else just to stay in the room. I was one of them. Vietnamese, on an F-1 visa, partially funding my own education after my family's business collapsed in a recession back home. The volleyball club wasn't designed as a solution to any of that. It just turned out to be one. The other project I initiated was less visible but maybe more direct. When my music teacher recognized my work ethic, she asked me to become a teaching assistant for the middle school orchestra. I said yes immediately. I worked with students on violin and piano, correcting technique, fixing rhythm, and helping them read scores. But the real work was emotional. These were kids who were afraid of being wrong in front of others, afraid of not being good enough, afraid of the same things I was afraid of when I first sat down at a piano at fifteen with no prior experience. I knew exactly what they needed because I had needed it too. One student, Devin, sat at the piano during rehearsal, unable to play a passage he'd been struggling with for weeks. He sighed and said he couldn't do it. I sat next to him, broke the section into shorter phrases, and asked him to play slowly. It wasn't perfect, but he kept going. At the concert, he played the whole piece. Watching that happen was the clearest I've ever felt about why music education matters, not just for students who are already thriving, but especially for the ones who are one bad rehearsal away from quitting. I'm pursuing a career in film and video game composition. That goal is about more than personal success. The worlds I want to score are built by diverse teams telling diverse stories, and those stories need composers who understand what it means to come from somewhere underrepresented and bring that into the work. Every trail I've left so far, the volleyball club, the teaching assistant role, the compositions rooted in Vietnamese culture, has been about creating space where there wasn't one before. That's not going to stop when I get to college. It's just going to have a bigger stage.

I never thought music would make me hate someone so much. It wasn't enjoyable seeing someone so chill about music be so good at it. Meanwhile, I wanted to make music my career. No choice either way. I needed to prove to my parents that this fantasy could genuinely happen, especially when they'd sacrificed everything for me to be here during a recession, struggling to meet half my tuition. Before meeting this guy, I practiced two hours a day and did my best on assigned tasks. That all changed when this new face showed up and dazzled everyone with his perfect pitch and improvisation skills. Then, days later, he showed me a symphony arrangement he did "last night." That's it. Game on. From that moment, the music room became my home. Four hours of piano every day, one hour of composing. Anything that stopped my progress was a hindrance. My skills went from never touching a piano before age 15 to winning a Silver medal at my state's Solo Ensemble Festival during my junior year. A silver medal didn't satisfy me. I craved more. Even in my senior year, it was four hours of piano and two hours of composing daily, doubling up on weekends. Then suddenly I hit a roadblock. Piano felt like a chore, and composing wasn't fun anymore. One day, after barely writing anything for four hours of composing, I questioned myself. Is this what I truly want? Is constantly hating myself what I wished for? My piano teacher's words came back to me: "Feel the music, Nhan. You're not a robot." Then my mother called from Vietnam. I finally told her how I felt. "We don't mind you failing, as long as you know you've done your best and are happy." I never thought I'd cry hearing those words. It took me a while to figure out what my rival knew all along, the reason his playing seemed so annoyingly effortless. Fun was the final variable I needed. I had to go back to my curious self, back to when I first discovered the musical magic behind anime. Both sides are me. Music has been the through line of my entire educational journey. It's why I stayed when my family's finances collapsed, and going home would have been easier. It's why I biked to a job nine to nine all summer to pay part of my own tuition. My goal is to compose for video games and film professionally, to write music that makes someone pause mid-gameplay and just sit in the feeling. It started with a soundtrack and a question I couldn't stop asking. It hasn't stopped since.

The honest answer is that I've been thinking about this since I was fourteen years old, watching anime in Vietnam, wondering who made the music and how I could become that person. Video game and film composition is not a vague dream for me. It's a specific career with a specific pipeline, and I've spent the last three years learning what that pipeline actually looks like. You need a portfolio of original work. You need to understand every genre well enough to write in it convincingly. You need connections with people who work in game design and film so that when a project needs a composer, your name comes up. You need to know how licensing and royalties work so that when someone wants to use your music, you don't hand it over for nothing. I've been working on all of it simultaneously, composing original pieces, studying jazz and classical theory, volunteering as a teaching assistant, performing at festivals, and getting my work in front of university orchestras. Every piece of it is intentional. My composition Trung Thu was performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. That wasn't luck. That was me finishing a piece, submitting it, and letting it find an audience. That's the model I intend to keep following: make the work, put it in front of people, build the reputation one piece at a time. The financial side is something I take seriously because I've had to. My family lost most of their income during a recession while I was already studying abroad. I've been partially funding my own education since my sophomore year. That experience taught me that talent without financial literacy is just talent waiting to be taken advantage of. The music industry has a long history of composers and performers who created enormous value and saw very little of it because they didn't understand the business they were in. I intend to understand it. Long-term, video game and film composition is the goal. But I also want to teach, collaborate, and eventually help other young composers from backgrounds like mine understand that this career is real and reachable. My art is how I plan to sustain myself financially. It's also how I plan to stay sane, stay connected to something that matters, and build something that outlasts me. Those two things aren't in conflict. They're the same plan.

I didn't come to the US thinking about fitness. I came here thinking about music. But somewhere between four hours of daily piano practice and the pressure of building a life from scratch in a country that wasn't mine, I found out pretty quickly that sitting at a keyboard for most of your waking hours does something to your body and your head. I needed to move. So I did. I started playing volleyball casually with friends, then soccer, then, eventually, I founded my school's first boys volleyball club because nobody else was going to do it. What started as something to do between practice sessions became something I genuinely looked forward to. The gym followed. Nothing extreme, just consistent enough to feel the difference. Since coming to the States, I've lost around 8 kilograms. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because I started paying attention to how I felt physically and connecting it to how I performed mentally. When I was sedentary and burned out, my playing got mechanical, and my composing dried up. When I was moving regularly, everything else opened up. My piano teacher kept telling me to feel the music. Turns out feeling the music is a lot easier when you're not completely locked in your own head. The health challenge I've had to overcome isn't dramatic. It's the quieter one that a lot of musicians don't talk about, the physical toll of obsessive practice, the tension, the stillness, the burnout that creeps in when your entire identity is tied to one thing done in one position for hours every day. Sports gave me a way out of that loop. They reminded me that I have a body, not just a brain and two hands. Volleyball also did something I didn't expect. It made me social in a way that music practice never could. I was pretty introverted when I arrived, and four to six hours alone at a piano every day wasn't helping. But building the club meant recruiting people, organizing scrimmages, and convincing skeptics to show up twice a week. I had to be energetic and visible, and present in a way that was completely new to me. That was its own kind of fitness, learning to show up for other people instead of just for yourself. Fitness for me isn't about performance numbers or aesthetics. It's about sustainability. I want a long career doing what I love, and that means taking care of the instrument I actually live in. The volleyball club is still running. I'm still playing. And I'm lighter, in more ways than one, than when I arrived.

My financial education didn't come from a classroom. It came from a phone call during my sophomore year, telling me my family had lost almost everything. Before that call, money was something that existed in the background. My parents handled it, the plan was set, and my only job was to study and practice. Then the recession hit Vietnam and hit my family directly. My father's company folded. My mother's shop collapsed under its own debt. Their combined income dropped from around fifty thousand dollars a year to fourteen thousand, with over two hundred thousand dollars of debt sitting on top of that. I was sixteen, on the other side of the world on an F-1 visa, and suddenly the plan didn't exist anymore. What followed was the most practical financial education I could have gotten. I learned that tuition doesn't wait for your family to recover. I learned that an F-1 visa means no federal aid, no work-study, and no safety net that most students don't even realize they have. I learned to read scholarship requirements the way other people read menus, quickly, looking for what applied to me and moving on from what didn't. That summer, I worked from nine in the morning to nine at night, biked to the job because I didn't have another option, and saved enough to cover part of my tuition. I was sixteen, and I was doing math I never expected to be doing. What I learned wasn't just about survival. It was about the relationship between money and time. Every hour I wasn't practicing or studying had a cost I could actually calculate. Every scholarship I didn't apply for was money left on the table. I stopped treating opportunities as optional and started treating them as obligations, because the gap between what my family could cover and what my education actually cost was real, and it wasn't going to close itself. Going forward, I want to build a career in film and video game composition, which means understanding the financial side of creative work, licensing, royalties, contracts, how to price your work, and protecting it. The music industry is full of talented people who got taken advantage of because they didn't understand the business they were in. I don't intend to be one of them. The same clarity that got me through high school on a collapsing budget is what I'm bringing into my career. I know what it costs to ignore the numbers. I'm not going to forget that.

Two years away from home teaches you what you actually miss. For me, it wasn't the food or the weather or even my family, not in the way I expected. It was the festivals. Specifically, Trung Thu, Vietnam's Mid-Autumn Festival, the one where the cities fill up with lanterns and mooncake shops and kids running through the streets holding little glowing lights like they own the night. I hadn't realized how much that image lived in me until I sat down to write my third original composition, and it just came out. Trung Thu: the piece started as homesickness and became a study in how music carries culture. I wanted to capture that nostalgic, warm feeling without leaning on anything obvious. I didn't use traditional Vietnamese instruments at all. Instead, I went after the vibe through harmony, using the pentatonic scale as the backbone of the main melody because it naturally carries that familiar, almost ancient quality that makes something feel like home even when it isn't trying to. The challenge was making it feel Vietnamese without it feeling like a costume, like I was borrowing something rather than actually living it. The orchestration is where things got interesting. I ended up discovering a combination I wasn't expecting, pizzicatos in the strings layered against marcatos in the woodwinds, that created this texture I can only describe as steampunk mixed with Ghibli. It wasn't planned. It came from spending five or six hours redoing orchestration I wasn't happy with and stumbling onto something that actually worked. Composing taught me that the best discoveries usually come right after the moment you want to give up. That's the part of composing I love and dread equally. What I'm trying to achieve with this piece is simple and also impossible. I want someone who has never been to Vietnam to hear it and get a small glimpse of what Trung Thu actually feels like from the inside. Not a documentary, not a postcard. Just the feeling of being a kid in a bustling city decorated with lanterns, watching other kids run past with their little glowing lights, and feeling like the whole world is warm and close and yours for one night. That's the thing I was chasing. I think I got close. And if it makes even one person curious enough to look up what Trung Thu actually is, then it did more than I ever expected a piece of music to do.

My parents didn't stop supporting me. They just ran out of road. Before I left Vietnam for the US, we had a plan. My mother owned a thriving cosmetics shop, and my father ran a commerce warehouse he'd just upgraded to a larger location, leasing it for ten years, expecting growth. Everything was on track. Then, not even halfway through my sophomore year, the recession hit and hit hard. My father's company folded. My mother couldn't keep up with the payments on her new shop. They moved everything back into our house and started over from scratch. Revenue dropped from around fifty thousand dollars a year to fourteen thousand. They had a debt of over two hundred thousand dollars. And I was already on the other side of the world, halfway through a school year, with tuition due. They gave me a choice. Figure something out, or come home. I couldn't go home. Not because Vietnam was bad, but because I had already seen what was possible here. A music program that actually pushed me. Teachers who believed in what I was doing. A real shot at becoming a composer. Going back meant closing a door I wasn't ready to close, so I chose to stay and figure it out. That summer, I biked to work every day from nine in the morning to nine at night. I saved enough to cover part of my tuition and convinced my parents to let me stay. During the school year, I applied to every scholarship in my city that would take my signature. I stayed at St. Bernard's on the condition that I would keep working and keep finding funding, because that was the only way it made financial sense. FAFSA was never an option. As a Vietnamese national on an F-1 visa, federal aid is simply not available to me, which means every dollar of support I've received has come from scholarships, personal work, and whatever my parents could scrape together despite everything they were dealing with back home. There was no safety net. There still isn't. What that taught me is harder to explain than it sounds. It wasn't just discipline, though I did learn to be disciplined. It was something closer to clarity. When you know that no one is going to catch you if you fall, you stop waiting for permission to take things seriously. I practiced piano four hours a day, not because someone told me to, but because I understood, in a very concrete way, that wasted time had a real cost. I went from never touching a piano before age fifteen to winning a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival. I had a composition performed by a university orchestra. I founded my school's first volleyball club. None of it happened because things were easy. All of it happened because I decided that the circumstances I was in were not going to be the ceiling on what I could do. My goal is to study composition at a university with a strong music program and eventually compose for film and video games. I want to make the kind of music that makes people feel like their stories belong in a concert hall or a game engine. Getting there without federal aid and with a family still recovering from financial collapse means every scholarship I receive is not just money. It's another semester of possibility. It's proof that the plan I chose over going home was the right one. I'm not asking for sympathy. I'm asking for the chance to keep going.

I was probably a bum. Video games were what I was glued to for most of my childhood, and honestly, how could I not be? School in Vietnam was just homework, then cram school, then more homework. So yeah, I gravitated hard toward the freedom and color that games offered. Extensive lore, wild characters, and these soundtracks that somehow made me feel things I didn't have words for yet. That's when it clicked. Someone made that music. Someone sat down and wrote it. And I wanted to be that person. What got me wasn't just that the music was beautiful. It was that it could be anything. A dying world full of monsters gets solemn guitars and hopeful choirs. A fantasy kingdom built on real-world cultures gets melodies pulled from corners of the earth I'd never visited. There were no rules, no ceiling. As long as the music served the moment, you were free. That kind of freedom felt like the opposite of everything I knew growing up, and I wanted to live inside it. So I picked up the piano at fifteen. Never touched one before that. Got humbled immediately, which was fine, because getting humbled just made me angry, and being angry made me practice. Four hours a day, every day. I had a rival at school, some guy who treated music like a casual hobby and was somehow better at it than I, the one who wanted it as a career. That made no sense to me, and it drove me crazy enough to lock in harder than I ever had before. Within two years, I went from struggling with both hands separately to winning a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival. A piece I wrote about Vietnam's Mid-Autumn Festival got performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. I was shocked every single time something like that happened, because none of it was planned. I just kept chasing the sound in my head. The challenges were real, though. My family's business collapsed during a recession while I was already studying abroad in the US. Revenue dropped from around fifty thousand dollars a year to eighteen thousand. My parents told me to make a choice: figure something out, or come home. I chose to stay. I biked to work every day that summer from nine in the morning to nine at night, earned enough to cover part of my tuition, and kept going. Music was the reason I stayed. It was the thing worth fighting for. But the grind caught up with me. Senior year, I hit a wall where composing felt like a chore and piano felt mechanical,l and I genuinely didn't know why I was doing any of it anymore. My piano teacher kept telling me I was playing like a robot. My mom called from Vietnam one night, and I finally told her how I felt, and she said something I wasn't expecting. She said they didn't care if I failed, as long as I was happy and knew I'd given it everything. I cried. And then I remembered why I started. Anime soundtracks. That feeling of hearing something so specifically crafted for a moment that it made the scene permanent in your memory. I went back to that, and everything opened back up. That's what I want to give people. Not just technically impressive music. Music that makes a moment stick. The kind of soundtrack that makes someone pause mid-gameplay and just sit there, not wanting to move, because the feeling is too good to leave. I want to blend the musical languages I've been collecting, Vietnamese folk, classical structure, jazz spontaneity, and anime drama into something that feels new but familiar at the same time. Something that tells people their culture and their stories are worth being heard in an orchestra hall, a game engine, or a film score. Kevin Penkin, the composer behind Made in Abyss, is someone I think about a lot. His music knows when to push and when to pull back. When to be enormous and when to just whisper underneath a scene. He pulls from Southeast Asian influences and mixes them with orchestral and electronic elements, and the result sounds like nothing else. That's the legacy I want to build. Not just music that's technically good, but music that makes people feel like they belong somewhere in it. I'm Vietnamese, and I grew up in a country that doesn't always get represented in the worlds I love most. I want to change that, one score at a time.

I never set out to be an athlete. I founded my school's first boys' volleyball club because I was bored and needed something to do outside of music. That was it. No grand vision, no athletic ambition. Just a kid who needed to move around for once instead of sitting at a piano for four hours straight. Getting people to show up was harder than I expected. Volleyball wasn't popular in our area, so most days it was four or five mates bumping the ball around halfheartedly before drifting off to play futsal. I kept inviting people anyway. Slowly, something shifted. One day, our basketball guy went up for a spike on pure instinct, and it connected, and suddenly everyone wanted to know how to do that. That moment taught me more about teamwork than anything I'd read in a classroom. You don't build a team by lecturing people about commitment. You stay excited long enough that they eventually catch it too. The dedication part I already understood, just from a different place. When I picked up the piano at fifteen with zero prior experience, I had to practice four hours a day just to keep up with people who'd been playing for years. I had a rival who made it look effortless, like music just lived inside him naturally, and it drove me absolutely insane. I pushed harder anyway. Earned a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival. Had a piece performed by a university orchestra. None of it came easy, and all of it came from just refusing to stop when things felt impossible. Resilience for me isn't some abstract quality. It's specific. It's biking to work at nine in the morning and not getting home until nine at night, every day of the summer, earning enough to pay part of my own high school tuition after my family's business collapsed in a recession. It's choosing to stay in the US and figure something out instead of going back to Vietnam. It's founding a volleyball club nobody asked for and watching it slowly turn into something people actually showed up for. I'm a musician who plays sports. A student who works to fund his own education. I don't fit neatly into one box, and honestly, I've stopped trying to. What I do know is that whether I'm at the piano, on the court, or in the classroom, I show up the same way every single time. Fully, and with very little interest in giving up.

Music was boring to me for the first fifteen years of my life. Back in Vietnam, it was just the same old boleros and ballads playing in the background while I did homework. Nothing grabbed me. Then I found video games, and more specifically, their soundtracks. Melodies pulling from every corner of the world, blending classical orchestration with pop, folk, and jazz into something that actually felt alive. And that was it for me. I wanted to make that. I picked up the piano at fifteen with zero experience and got humbled immediately. But I was obsessed. Within two years, I went from struggling to play with both hands separately to winning a Silver medal at California's CMEA State Solo and Small Ensemble Festival. I started composing too. A piece I wrote about Vietnam's Mid-Autumn Festival ended up being performed by the Sonoma State University Symphony Orchestra and featured at the 2026 California All-State Music Educators Conference. None of that was the plan. I just kept chasing whatever sound was stuck in my head. Jazz found me the same way my rival did: uninvited, slightly annoying, and impossible to ignore. My teacher sat me down and made it clear that everything I wanted as a video game composer, the spontaneity, the emotional range, the cultural fluency, jazz had already been doing for a century. At first, the chords felt like gang signs I wasn't allowed to throw. Then I heard my teacher's band play live, and I cried. First time any piece of music had done that to me. It wasn't some sweeping orchestral moment either. It was warm, weirdly casual, and it absolutely wrecked me. I've been studying it since, picking apart its theory, learning its vocabulary, and slowly figuring out how to make it mine. My goal is to compose for video games and film. The kind of music that makes someone stop mid-game and just sit there in the feeling. To do that, I need to be fluent in every musical language I can get my hands on, and jazz is the one that teaches you to actually speak freely, to respond, to listen, and to take risks in real time. I want to let it find its way into my compositions the way it finds its way into everything else worth listening to. Do I see myself playing jazz? I already am. Just with a lot more to learn, and honestly, a lot more to love about it.

I never thought music would make me hate someone so much. It wasn't enjoyable seeing someone so chill about music be so good at it. Meanwhile, I wanted to make music my career. I needed to make this work, to prove to my parents that this dream could genuinely happen, especially when they've sacrificed everything for me to be here, during a recession, struggling to meet half my tuition. And to think someone who treats music as a hobby is better than me? That didn't make sense back then. Am I not the one who wants to make this a living reality? Before meeting this guy, I practiced two hours a day and did my best on assigned tasks. That changed when this new face showed up and dazzled everyone with his perfect pitch and improvisation skills. "I want to be a composer, so piano isn't something I need to worry about," I convinced myself. Then, days later, he showed me a symphony arrangement he did "last night." That's it. Game on. From that moment, the music room became my home: four hours of piano every day, one hour of composing. Anything that stopped me was a hindrance, from friends' invitations to my family's FaceTime calls. I was addicted to leveling up. My skills went from never touching a piano before age 15 to winning a Silver medal at my state's Solo Ensemble Festival during my junior year. But was that enough? No. Piano is critical, but composing is my life. A silver medal didn't satisfy me; I craved more, and I still do. In my senior year, after my rival graduated, college auditions were next. By then, it was 4 hours of piano and 2 hours of composing every day, doubling on weekends. Failure was unacceptable. Then I hit a roadblock. Piano felt like a chore; composing wasn't fun anymore. One day, after barely writing anything for four hours of trying, I asked myself: Is this what I truly want? Is constantly hating myself what I wished for all these years? Am I even having fun? I thought of my piano teacher's words: "Feel the music, Nhan. You're playing as though every note is the same. You're not a robot." Then my phone rang. It was my mother in Vietnam. After two years, I finally told her how I felt. "We don't mind you failing, as long as you've done your best and are happy. That's all that counts." I never thought I'd cry hearing those words. It took me a while to figure out something my rival knew all along, the one thing that made him different, and the reason his playing always seemed so annoyingly effortless: fun was the final variable I needed. I am grateful to my past self for the work ethic, but to evolve further, I needed to return to my curious self, back to when I first discovered the musical magic of anime. Reconnecting my critical, hardworking side with the gleeful, gaming-inspired musical superfan I was is what was missing. Because at my core, both sides are me.