(Hung Huynh ’24)
Course 2-A Engineering
“MIT isn’t just about the smarts,” says Hung Huynh ’24. “It’s about passion, collaboration, and support.” A first-generation college student, Huynh is thrilled that the Drs. Francesco and Marybeth Pompei Scholarship has made it possible for him to attend MIT. “It’s better than a perfect match,” he says.
Growing up in the Midwest after his family left Vietnam, Huynh loved working with his hands. “I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to make things,” he recalls. Interviewing a mechanical engineer for a ninth-grade career planning assignment prompted him to research engineering schools, and MIT quickly moved to the top of his list.
Huynh is already working on two startup ideas, one of which focuses on social entrepreneurship and digital inclusion. “More than a billion and a half children were out of school because of Covid-19 and a third of them didn’t have access to online education,” he notes.
His other startup idea arose from personal experience with health care: “As a poor family, we always dreaded trips to the hospital because of the cost,” Huynh says bluntly. He hopes to use nanomedicine to create affordable, scalable methods of preventing the atherosclerosis that causes ischemic heart disease, which is the leading cause of death worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
Huynh says, “Because of MIT, I’ve been empowered with the resources and perspective to start small but think big.”
Meet more MIT scholarship recipients.
—Christine Thielman
This article was originally published in August 2021.
