"Student with 5 Good Criteria" — University Level

The title

"Sinh viên 5 tốt" — Student with 5 Good Criteria — is a title of the Vietnam Students' Association, awarded across five dimensions:

1. Good morality — conduct and contribution to the student community.
2. Good study — academic results above a defined threshold.
3. Good physical fitness — participation in sport and physical activity.
4. Good volunteering — participation in volunteer campaigns and community programs.
5. Good integration — foreign language capability, and participation in international or cross-cultural activity.

I received it at university level in 2021 and 2022.

Why it is on a technical portfolio

Because it is the only line on my CV that measures something other than output.

The five criteria are deliberately hard to satisfy simultaneously — strong grades alone are not enough, and neither is being the person who shows up to every volunteer campaign. Holding all five in the same year, twice, required actually planning a year rather than reacting to it.

That is the habit it built, and it is the one I still use: deciding at the start of a period what the small number of things that matter are, and then protecting the time for them.

The volunteering and integration parts

These two mattered most in the long run. Volunteering is where I met people outside my faculty and outside computer science, which is most of the reason I ended up comfortable talking to business users rather than only to developers. Integration is where I started taking English seriously — five years before it became the working language of a client engagement in the Philippines.

To expand: what each criterion required in practice.