Four years later, the 23-year-old holds a full-time offer from Microsoft, a perfect GPA and fluency in several languages, a turnaround few could have predicted.
She received the full-time return offer from Microsoft in September 2024, just as she entered her senior year at Mount Holyoke College, a private women’s liberal arts college in South Hadley, Massachusetts, U.S. She had interned at the tech giant twice before, but her path into computer science began with confusion, exhaustion, and a crisis of confidence.
She won admission to Mount Holyoke in 2020 with financial aid covering 75% of her four-year tuition. But when Covid-19 pushed classes online, she felt the experience was not worth the cost and deferred for a gap year. She studied Chinese, read widely about geopolitics and imagined herself pursuing international relations instead.
That plan quickly fell apart. The coursework felt overly abstract, and she struggled to follow lectures.
“This was the hardest period of my life,” she said. She became so discouraged she even considered returning to Vietnam, thinking, “Why study abroad and spend so much money when I don’t have a goal?”
Searching for direction, she sought advice from friends and teachers. One teacher told her something that stuck: if you don’t know what to do, try everything. So the next semester, she signed up for a wide mix of courses: philosophy, Russian literature, math, Chinese and computer science.
Python changed everything. She fell in love with the satisfaction of solving problems and began practicing intensely to catch up. Within weeks, she went from spending 30 hours on a major assignment to finishing harder ones in just three.
Seeing strong job prospects in tech, she applied for three unpaid internships after her first year: web development, software testing and software engineering. She had taken only one foundational CS course, so she self-studied machine learning and AI concepts to survive the workload. She often slept only 3–4 hours a night, but her skills improved rapidly.
In her second year, she took a chance and applied to big tech companies. Against her expectations, Microsoft replied.
The process included an application review, a phone interview and a final round with a manager plus two coding tests. She nearly failed the first test because of nerves. But once she believed she had lost her chance, she relaxed and solved the second problem in just five minutes. The interview also went smoothly.
Two weeks later, she received an email offering her a paid Microsoft internship worth nearly $8,000 per month. She thought it might be a scam at first.
“From unpaid intern to earning thousands of dollars at a major tech corporation, it felt life-changing,” she said.
During the internship, she learned C#, practiced data analysis and handled complex tasks calmly thanks to her self-learning habits. After three months, she earned a return offer. She returned the following year, completed projects weeks early, assisted other teams and received another return offer, this time a full-time job.
Back on campus, her momentum carried into academics. She continued studying Chinese and achieved HSK6, the highest proficiency level, added Korean and Arabic classes, and graduated in 3.5 years with a perfect 4.0 GPA.
Her professors noticed her drive. Professor Barbara Dalton Rotundo said Anh was not only proactive but highly effective as a teaching assistant across multiple computer science courses, noting that she “has broad and deep knowledge” and helps other students understand challenging material.
Professor Yun-Hsuan (Melody) Su described her as hardworking, creative, communicative and quick to grasp requirements, someone who could succeed “on any path she chooses.”
Today, Anh helps ensure Microsoft’s video-calling features run safely and smoothly while also developing new filters.
She plans to take Korean and Arabic proficiency exams and aims for a higher technical role in the future.
Looking back, she says her life changed not because of talent but because she refused to stop.
“At one point, I thought I had to return to the starting line,” she said. “But sometimes, if you just keep going, the path reveals itself.”
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