Vietnamese high schooler wins German government scholarship usually awarded to master’s, PhD candidates

Tran Le Hanh Dung, a 12th-grader in the German language program at the Foreign Language Specialized School (FLSS) under Vietnam National University, Hanoi, is one of two students from the capital to receive the award this cycle.

Her application carried a three-year grade point average of 9.7-9.8 out of 10, a C1-level German certificate through the Deutsches Sprachdiplom Stufe II (DSD-II), and an IELTS score of 8.5. She also took first prize at VNU Hanoi’s German Olympiad and second prize at Grammatikzauber, a German grammar teaching competition, and serves as vice president of her school’s German Club.

The scholarship is funded by Germany’s Federal Foreign Office and administered through the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). It covers tuition, living costs, health and accident insurance, and return airfare. Teachers at FLSS said full undergraduate awards in the program are unusual because it primarily targets graduate-level study.

Though her specialization is languages, Dung will study Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen, a German degree that combines industrial engineering with business and economics. She picked it because she enjoys mathematics and physics and wants to understand how technical work connects to real economic outcomes.

“I think an engineer needs more than technical expertise. They also need to understand economics to create products that are valuable to society,” she said.

Her motivation letter opened with a childhood memory of drawing washing machines, dishwashers and small assembly lines to help her parents with housework. Those sketches, she wrote, were her earliest sign of curiosity about engineering.

To get the letter into the shape she wanted, Dung spent nearly two months studying DAAD’s criteria and rewrote the draft more than 20 times. She checked everything down to the font and the file name before submitting.

Her German education started early. At age two, her parents took her with them while they were doing graduate research in Germany, and Dung credits the immersion for her natural pronunciation. After returning to Vietnam, she kept the language alive through learning materials and German-language films, and built habits like writing her own thoughts in German so she would have a reason to look up unfamiliar words.

“Writing is my weakest skill, because it demands rigorous critical thinking and tight time management,” she said. To improve, she reads sample essays and past exam papers to absorb how ideas are expressed and to build her vocabulary. She always learns new words in a specific context or invents a short story around them so they stick.

“Learning a language isn’t just learning how to speak. It’s learning about culture and how to see the world,” she said. “With enough perseverance, even small steps can lead to very big dreams.”

Her homeroom teacher, Nguyen Ngoc Lan, described Dung as a disciplined and self-reliant student who balanced classwork, international certification exams and her study-abroad application without losing focus.

Dung will travel to Germany in August 2026 for a one-year Studienkolleg, the preparatory program that Vietnamese high school graduates typically complete before formally enrolling in a German bachelor’s degree.