President’s Scholar 2021-22

The President’s Scholarship was established in September 2011 when LU received a generous donation of HK$8 million from Dr Helmut Sohmen. Each year, a top student seeking an opportunity to study at a prestigious liberal arts college overseas receives the honour of becoming the “President’s Scholar”. Miss Pham Thanh Thao, Clara, a fourth-year business student from Vietnam majoring in finance, was proud to be selected as the 9^th President’s Scholar, which enabled her to undertake a year’s study at Davidson College in North Carolina in the US in the 2021-22 academic year.

Clara is aiming for a career in fintech and consultancy, and thus enjoyed the exciting economics and data science courses at Davidson, such as Econometrics and Programming and Problem Solving. She found that her academic life in the US was quite different from that in Hong Kong because of the difference in their respective teaching styles and course contents. For example, Davidson offers more high-level general economics courses, as opposed to the specialised courses offered at LU. At Davidson, she also explored academic areas that are not available at LU, such as computer science and theatre arts, and courses in data science helped her to greatly improve her skills in programming and data handling. Overall, she found that her learning experiences at LU and Davidson were highly stimulating and complemented each other perfectly, equipping her with the necessary skills and business knowledge for future success.

In addition to being recruited as the Teaching Assistant for the Economic Department at Davidson, Clara was proud to be invited to perform an independent study of cross-border mergers and acquisitions with Dr Caleb Stroup, Associate Professor of Economics at Davidson. Clara considered this independent research experience to be extremely valuable to her learning, as it was the first time that she had dealt with a large amount of data and had to construct a database from scratch. She found that the research was challenging but very rewarding, and that it was a unique opportunity to receive personal advice and mentoring from a top economics professor.

Outside of the classroom, Clara travelled to other cities in the US to learn more about the country. She received a grant from Davidson to visit New York City, where she visited Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange, and the headquarters of the biggest financial institutions in the world. She found this experience mesmerising, and especially inspiring to a finance student. Clara feels privileged to have had this once-in-a-lifetime chance to study abroad.