Youngest graduate heads to medical school for psychiatry

Psych major Tina Nguyen was 16 when she came to Temple. Now, at 18, she’s ready for the challenges of medical school.

The first person at Temple University who heard “the story”?

That would have been the gentleman handling her admissions paperwork, who couldn’t understand how a transfer student with 28 college credits had no record of ever attending high school.

So, just as she had done many times before, Tina Nguyen took a big, long, deep breath and told him “the story.” She had no high school diploma, she explained, because she should have been in high school.

“And I didn’t take the GED,” she said matter-of-factly, “because you have to be 17 to take the GED. I did have to explain some things.”

At the time, Nguyen was a month shy of her 16th birthday. But she had already completed a year of college. At age 14, she had begun pursuing her undergraduate degree through the Program for the Exceptionally Gifted at Mary Baldwin College (MBC), a small liberal arts school in Staunton, Va.

Today, Nguyen will receive her bachelor’s degree in psychology, with minors in biology and business administration. Then, she’ll take a much-deserved year off to prepare for—and apply to—medical schools as she works toward her goal of becoming a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Her first choice for medical school is the University of California at Irvine.

At age 18, Nguyen is the youngest member of Temple’s Class of 2004, which boasts 6,465 graduates. And, believe it or not, Nguyen, who has a 3.72 grade point average, still doesn’t have that high school diploma.

“I’m kind of hoping that it won’t matter, now that I have a bachelor’s,” she said with a grin.

Nguyen’s road to commencement began in seventh grade, when, as a student at Peirce Middle School in West Chester, she took the SATs—and scored 1180—as part of Talented Youth Search, a program sponsored by Johns Hopkins University.

“I just wanted to take it to see how I did,” she said. “I got an average score.”

But for a 13-year-old, her score was anything but average. That year, MBC sent her a letter about its Program for the Exceptionally Gifted, which allows young women to start college up to four years early.

In ninth grade, Nguyen went off to college at Mary Baldwin, staying at the 2,000-student residential school in the Virginia mountains for a year, taking college classes, and, like most college freshmen, making lifelong friendships.

The transition wasn’t easy.

“I was thinking, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ You can’t really go back to being a high school student,” Nguyen said. “There is pressure. You can’t have someone say, ‘Oh, so you’re the one who went to college and had to come back.’ In my town, I’m known as ‘the girl who went to college.’

“Freshman year was tough,” she continued. “In grade school, everything came easily to me. I never studied. I didn’t have to. But freshman year, I realized I had no study habits.

“I met my closest friends at MBC,” added Nguyen, who will move from her City Line apartment back to her family home in Exton after graduation. “We went through the same things and all lived together.”

But after a year in Virginia, Nguyen’s parents, Hop and Thuy, who brought their family to the United States from Vietnam in 1990, wanted her to move closer to home, and Nguyen says she was ready for another, different challenge. She considered a career in computer science before deciding to attend Temple to study in the University’s world-class psychology program.

“I decided on Temple because we do have a good psychology program, and the school is close to home,” she said, noting that she’s much more comfortable in an urban environment. “And it wasn’t too expensive.”

Because she wasn’t a high school graduate, Nguyen didn’t qualify for the grant given to Pennsylvania residents who attend college. And because she had already been a college student, she was basically treated like a regular transfer student at Temple, despite her tender age.

That suited Nguyen just fine. While she’s made many friends at Temple, only a few close ones know “the story.”

In the next few years, Nguyen will add more to her story, including a chapter on how she never thought she’d end up a doctor. Her parents, she said, always wanted that for her—“How about dentistry? Pediatrics? Pharmacology?” they’d say—but she had other ideas, choosing, instead, to learn about psychology.

Her exposure to the field, however, made her realize medical school—and a professional career in psychiatry—was really what she wanted.

“My parents and I kind of made a compromise,” said Nguyen, who works in the emergency department at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and used to volunteer with Temple’s Project SHINE program, in which college students help older immigrants learn English.

“Now, I’m going to medical school because I want to do it,” she said. “I’m very interested in developmental psychopathology and childhood disorders. At some point, I might also want to work with ‘gifted’ students.

“I really like kids,” she added with a smile. “And I feel like I still am one. I’d be a freshman right now, right?” — Barbara Baals