Do Gia Hien from Vietnam: an exchange year turned into an AI degree at HIT

The exchange as a pipeline

Hien's route into a Chinese degree was not a direct application. It began with a one-year exchange programme in 2023, during which he saw the pace of development in artificial intelligence and robotics at first hand. Living and studying in China is what pushed him to consider long-term study in the field, rather than the other way round.

Short programmes and exchanges are frequently treated as a soft option by applicants who are focused on degree entry. In practice they function as the longest lead-in available: a year in the country, a network on the ground, a language environment, and a credible reason to state on a scholarship form.

Turning the experience into evidence

Back in Vietnam, Hien entered the national science and engineering contest and took second prize in the physics and astronomy category. That result converted an informal interest into something an admissions committee could assess, and strengthened both his profile and his own certainty about the direction.

His stated purpose is explicit and return-oriented: to access China's core developments in artificial intelligence, bring that expertise home, and use it to build stronger infrastructure and local solutions for Vietnam's national challenges. That framing — skill acquisition tied to a national need — is exactly what government scholarship panels are set up to reward.

The outcome

He was awarded a scholarship to study computer science at Harbin Institute of Technology, one of China's strongest engineering and artificial intelligence universities.

The sequence worth copying is the order of operations: go first, find the field, build a verifiable achievement, then apply. His account is one of several on this site where the applicant was already in the country, or had been, before the degree application was written.