I was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1978, but my family escaped on tiny fisher boat
from Vietnam for political freedom and a better life when I was one. Because we
were rescued by a German charity ship looking for boat people like us in the sea,
I spent my entire childhood and teenage life in Germany. After finishing my high
school degree at Leibniz High School in Gelsenkirchen, West Germany in 1997 I moved
to the United States to study abroad.
My college years were spent at Santa Monica College near Los Angeles, the University
of California Berkeley in Northern California as well as a semester abroad at the
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong.
Upon graduating from Berkeley with a Bachelor's Degree in computer science in 1999,
I ended up working for a variety software companies that led me to explore and live
in areas such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle and Silicon Valley. It is here
in Silicon Valley, where I've spent most of my California life, and where I also
obtained my Master's Degree in Software Engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University
Silicon Valley campus in 2008.
A short while after getting married in 2009, we decided that living in California
was getting too boring for us, so we relocated to the east coast, where we now live
in New York City.
Minh T. Nguyen
December 2012