Born in Vietnam, Heidi Nguyen is grateful for the supportive environment at Daniels
Classwork and her capstone project for the YMCA of Metro Denver marked much of the time Heidi Nguyen spent in the Business Analytics Master’s Degree (MSBA) program at the Daniels College of Business, but one of her most meaningful experiences during her time on campus was working as a graduate assistant in Daniels’ undergraduate career center.
And Nguyen was able to translate those experiences into a full-time job in the United States after graduation.
“When I was an international undergraduate student at Texas Christian University, I got a lot of help from the career center,” said Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam. “This was a good chance for me to pay it forward and help the students at Daniels. It was nice being part of that community on campus.”
A welcoming community was harder to find when Nguyen first left Vietnam to attend TCU—she was looking for a change of scenery, she said, as well as a chance to spread her wings.
“That independence and freedom to learn different things, and not having your family’s pressure, is important, especially for Asian students,” she said. “In Asian culture, we’re expected to have just a few paths that your parents want for you. It was good to have that freedom from not having a lot of my parents’ ideas on what I should be doing.”
At first, Nguyen found a community with other international students. Later, to meet more people, she became a resident assistant and joined a sorority. Throughout the process, she learned more about herself and what it took to succeed.
Heidi Nguyen
“The biggest thing I learned was to ask for help and to really know what your strengths and weaknesses are,” she said. “You can only truly understand yourself in challenging situations, and being in a different country was challenging. I had to learn, ‘Oh, I actually am good at this, and I’m not good at this. How can I improve myself?’ That’s why I went to the career center a lot when I was an undergrad student, to improve on public speaking.”
Nguyen graduated from TCU with a bachelor’s of business administration and a student resume that included a post as director of diversity and inclusion for the TCU Student Government Association, as well as membership in the leadership program at the university’s Neeley School of Business, the International Student Association, and the Vietnamese Student Association. She landed a job as an analyst, then a consultant, with Deloitte in Texas and New York before moving to Denver for another change of scenery, and to study analytics at Daniels.
“At Deloitte, I was doing tech consulting. It was in the tech field, but not directly related to analytics,” she said. “The program at Daniels really deepened my knowledge about analytics in that sense. When I was doing tech consulting, I was handling mostly financial and accounting data, and the ability to look through a lot of data to see what’s going on was really interesting to me. Data is now an organization’s most important asset, and it’s a good feeling to be able to get on that tech curve.”
Nguyen dove into extracurriculars at Daniels as well. She was a member of the Graduate Business Student Association, which is aimed at enhancing the student experience, promoting interaction and networking, and building community among Daniels graduate students, the University of Denver, and the city of Denver. At the undergraduate career center, she helped to roll out a LinkedIn Learning program for students and conducted mock interviews with seniors who were applying for jobs with consulting firms.
“With the big firms, the biggest thing between a person who gets an offer and a person who doesn’t is how prepared they were for the interview process,” she said. “If you are prepared in the right way coming into the interview and you know exactly what it’s going to be like, you’ll have a much better chance of getting it. It was a good opportunity for me to provide that insight.”
In August, Nguyen put her MSBA degree to good use, accepting the position of business intelligence manager at New York-based media agency Horizon Media. She works remotely from Denver in the full-time role.
“We do a lot of digital marketing for consumer brands, and they have a lot of data,” she said. “I am the person working on the data, building dashboards and presenting them to our team to really help them understand how effective our social strategies and our digital strategies are.”
Analytics appealed to Nguyen because it’s a field that’s applicable all over the world, and she chose Horizon Media because it’s a midsize company that uses the same software and tools she is likely to encounter in several years, when she plans to return to Vietnam.
“In the near future, I would like to stay in the U.S., but long-term, I would like to go back to Vietnam,” she said. “I would like to contribute to growing the business environment there. In terms of the technical curve, we are a little bit behind compared to the U.S. After maybe 10 years, what I learned here can really be applied to Vietnam.”
Nguyen’s success comes as no surprise to Philip Beaver, director of the MSBA program, who says Nguyen stood out because of how driven and hard-working she was.
“She has a passion for learning, but more than that, she has a passion for problem-solving and taking on hard, data-driven problems,” Beaver said. “She was in my office a lot discussing real-world problems and how you might approach them.”
Nguyen appreciated her professors and classmates in the MSBA program, and she also appreciated being part of a larger community of international students.
“Daniels is an open environment for international students,” she said. “I attended a Lunar New Year event at DU, and I was surprised to see so many people from different backgrounds. My classmates are very well traveled, they have experienced different cultures and they’ve been in different backgrounds. That helped with the insightful conversations we had in class, and it’s a more accurate representation of what my work experience has been, as well.”