My name is Ha Nguyen and I’m majoring in Global Affairs concentrating in Global Governance. This semester, I am working on a research project that involves identifying how private supplementary tutoring has become a substantial industry in Vietnam; categorizing the current regulations regarding private tutoring enforced in Ho Chi Minh city (HCMC), the most populated city in Vietnam; and investigating the legal consciousness and interpretation of the direct stakeholders such as parents and teachers regarding these regulations. Vietnam is an ideal site to investigate this phenomenon because education policymakers are also amidst the process of restructuring regulations pertaining to private tutoring. As a developing country, education is often regarded as the key to success in Vietnam, and private tutoring thrives in this country to assist the needs of the students to achieve academic goals.This project is a continuation of my work in the seminar program Honors in the Major, in which I got the opportunity to create my own original research under the guidance of my Global Affairs faculty, Dr. Niklas Hultin. This semester, I decided to gather more data on my stakeholders’ perceptions by distributing surveys to various tutoring centers in HCMC as well as using Qualtrics, an online survey platform, to ask the same questions with potential participants through social media outreach. I spend a lot of time learning a significant amount of knowledge about the process of effective and efficient question design as well as the ethics regarding research involving human subject interactions.
My long-term plan after graduation is to work on the Hill assisting Members of Congress in creating and amending policies. This project allows me to investigate how the people that are directly affected by the regulations of private tutoring interpret and perceive them. So far, I have learned that regulations most often will have some unintended consequences during or after enforcement that are drastically different from the initial goals of the policies. It is very exciting to be able to see the connection between the developments of my research as it unfolds with what I have previously learned in class.
