Nguyen Nhat Quang, 23 years old, is a former student of Hanoi - Amsterdam High School for the Gifted. Five years ago, Nhat Quang was overwhelmed with emotion when he received the letter of acceptance to the Computer Science major in the early admission round of Rice University (USA) with a scholarship of 6.5 billion VND.

The path to Microsoft of a Vietnamese male student in the US

Sharing about his journey of applying for internships and finding jobs in the US, Nhat Quang said he had gone through memorable seasons of "spreading out applications" for internships and jobs.

Specifically, during his second year of college (2021), Nhat Quang sent out 150 applications. After going through rigorous interview rounds, Nhat Quang was accepted for the position of software engineer at Facebook.

During his 3-month internship, Nhat Quang was assigned to work in the short video group. Here, the male student was assigned to write code for the feature of awarding stars to content creators on Facebook's short videos for website format.

By the third year internship season (2022), the male student was more selective and sent 200 applications, then received interviews from 10 units and was accepted for an internship at Nvidia Technology Corporation. Here, the male student was assigned the task of building software to simulate the surrounding environment for self-driving cars.

According to Nhat Quang, although he had experience as a software engineer intern at two "big guys" in the technology field in the US and had a pretty good profile, the male student was very stressed during the application process to find an official job in the US.

During his first official job search, from July 2023 to February 2024, Nhat Quang sent out more than 600 job application emails. This time, the male student did not choose between large or small companies, but wherever recruiting international employees for software engineering positions, the male student applied.

"At the end of 2023, technology companies and corporations in the US laid off a series of employees with 1-2 years of experience. After more than 1 month of interning at Nvidia Technology Corporation, my manager announced that there would be no more positions for interns to stay and work officially after graduation," Nhat Quang expressed his concern when the opportunity to work officially at Nvidia ended.

Feeling that applying for a job in a special context where writing only 1-2 self-introductions is not enough, Nhat Quang took advantage of projects he had done in the US and personal experience to focus on writing 17 different self-introductions to send out for applications.

From more than 600 job application emails, after 4 months of waiting, Nhat Quang received responses from about 37 companies, and entered the final interview round of 15 companies. The final result was that Nhat Quang was accepted to 4 places, including 1 start-up company, 1 oil and gas company, the remaining two places were TikTok and Microsoft - an American multinational corporation.

Strict personnel selection

According to Nhat Quang, the process of applying for an internship or job in the US usually has 2-3 rounds, including submitting an application, taking a test, and an interview. At Microsoft, Nhat Quang went through the following rounds: submitting an online application, taking an online test, and 3 rounds of interviews.

"In the first two rounds of interviews, the employer will look at the self-description, ask the candidate to talk more about the project at school or the situation where there were mistakes and how to handle them; strengths, weaknesses and projects that the candidate is proud of. Then comes the final interview round with the manager.

After days of waiting, receiving a job offer from Microsoft Corporation around February 2024, 5 months before graduating from university, I was extremely happy and felt very relieved. Microsoft has what I need, such as stability, sustainability, a strong foundation, a good salary and I can learn many things here," said Nhat Quang.

From July 2024, Nhat Quang started working as a software engineer at Microsoft Corporation's Cloud Data Center in the US.

After a tough job search, Nhat Quang also established a career guidance project for Vietnamese students looking for jobs in the US, with the desire to provide knowledge and skills to apply for jobs in highly specialized fields such as software and data engineering, machine learning.