MHS alumni have gone on to study a diverse selection of subjects in reputable colleges, and The Union spoke with a few of them to learn about their current lives.
Kaden Nguyen, a sophomore at Stanford University and an alumnus from 2023, majors in political science and plans to go into environmental advocacy, different from the careers the rest of his family has pursued, he said.
“I’m from a family that is very much STEM-oriented,” Kaden Nguyen said. “All of my older cousins either become doctors or engineers or work in accounting, so I didn’t really have a mentor figure in my family who worked in the field of law or public advocacy. I think that was a really big challenge, just feeling like a fish out of water trying to navigate things on my own for the first time.”
Kaden Nguyen majors in political science because of its methodology and takes minors in the subjects he’s passionate about, he said.
“My major is really about methods, research, thinking about social sciences in that scientific method and being able to conduct studies and engage with it in that way,” Kaden Nguyen said. “So my minors being environmental justice and Asian-American studies I think are more representative of what I’m really passionate about.”
Kaden Nguyen’s favorite memory from college so far has been participating in an internship for Point Blue Conservation Science, he said.
“As a part of that internship, I was able to attend the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity,” Kaden Nguyen said. “That allowed me to travel to Colombia, and attend my first-ever United Nations conference, which was such an insane experience.”
While Kaden Nguyen took a non-STEM route, Shreya Nakum, a sophomore at UC Irvine and an alumna from 2023, found her passion in computer science, she said.
“Unlike things like biology or chemistry, it’s not as exam-heavy per se,” Nakum said. “It’s more that you get to create projects. … it’s fun to see a physical product of what you’ve learned through your code passing.”
For most of her time in high school and middle school, she intended to study astrophysics or astronomy, Nakum said.
“But during high school, I did a project in computational astronomy, and what I noticed in that research was that rather than the theory part of astronomy, even though I absolutely love that, I really liked putting together the graphs, doing data analysis,” Nakum said.
Nakum decided to major in computer science because she preferred quantitative analysis over theory, she said.
“Rather than going into astronomy and specializing in computational astronomy, I could go into computer science and maybe do interdisciplinary research with other sides of science rather than only computer science stuff,” Nakum said.
Nakum would advise students entering college to balance academics and their social lives, she said.
“Especially your first year – make sure you’re not only studying or only having too much fun,” Nakum said. “You should be going out and having fun, really enjoying your time being independent, but also make sure that you’re focusing on your schoolwork, getting good grades, and future career opportunities.”
Kevin Nguyen, a junior at UCLA and an alumnus from 2022, has triple majors in business, economics, and statistics, he said.
“The journey is kind of a self-discovering process, and learning kind of what I like and what I want to do, over the course of the last three years,” Kevin Nguyen said. “I started off as a pre-business econ major, coming and wanting to maybe eventually do something in management. But then as I began taking more and more classes, I realized that I really missed taking math classes, and more computational, STEM field classes, so I decided to pick up statistics.”
The biggest learning experience he’s had in college so far comes from the people around him, Nguyen said.
“One thing I learned the most is about the different kinds of people that are out there,” Kevin Nguyen said. “Every single year, I have had different roommates, and all of them have been really great. Each of them are different types of people; for example last year, all of my suitemates were frat guys which I never thought I’d be hanging out with, and at the same time there’s people who play DnD (Dungeons and Dragons), and people who are a lot more culturally aware and focused.”
Kevin Nguyen would advise incoming college freshmen to search for new things in college, he said.
“When you enter college, and you go to that club fair at the beginning, you sign up for 15-20 clubs,” Kevin Nguyen said. “You see a table that’s interesting by any means, you sign up for it. You go to the first meetings for each of those, and you’ll realize that something is interesting and you really want to go for that. It’s a lot easier to get into things at the beginning of the year than to do so later.”
Kaden Nguyen wants to remind students to remain compassionate during college admissions season, he said.
“You may see friendships fall apart, you may see some shady business going around the senior class — a lot of gossip, I know that was the case for me,” Kaden Nguyen said. “Be a person with integrity and honesty and be a kind person. It’s a very stressful period in your life, so be a kind person.”