From Dream To Reality – End of Academic Year 2020-2021

(*) Speech from Professor Rohit Verma, Provost, VinUniversity during the End-of-Academic-Year Ceremony for the academic year 2020-2021.

We started this academic year with an audacious dream – that we will create a world-class university, right here in Hanoi which will be a magnet for the most talented students and faculty from Vietnam and around the world.

Let’s go back in time to July 1^st 2020 when we had started our first academic year. While we had just moved to our new campus, the world was going through the early stages of COVID pandemic. There were considerable challenges and many wondered if we will be able to continue with our plans to start the university. However, despite difficulties we continued with the admissions process; with the recruitment of faculty and staff; and with all the necessary administrative and legal work to launch the university. But the launch of VinUniversity was still a dream on July 1^st.

This dream became a reality in early October 2020 when our 1^st batch of students walked in to the campus.

After that … everything changed forever:

• Our campus became alive, younger, and definitely more fun and exciting!
• Throughout the year we held many memorable and “first-time-ever” activities.
• We signed several partnership agreements with universities around the world and with leading corporations for student exchanges, internships, and research collaborations.
• We offered over 50 courses during Fall 2020 and Spring 2021.
• Our students participated in several external competitions and achieved remarkable successes.
• Our faculty members published over 50 papers in high-quality international journals and received several research grants.
• And more …

I am so proud of our achievements and would like to end my statement by saying that these are our collective achievements. Today VinUni is a vibrant community of students; faculty and staff from many countries around the world; parents; our strategic collaborators Cornell and Penn; many other universities around the world including Yonsei and Seoul National in South Korea, University of Technology Sydney in Australia, Western University in Canada; and several corporate partners including Vinpearl, VinAI, VinMec, VinBrain, VinHMS, EY and others. As we conclude our first academic year successfully, I am thankful to all of you for working hard to make the dream of VinUni a reality. It was indeed an awesome “take-off” year.

I look forward to another successful year where we will build further on our achievements to reach the “sky and beyond”.

Rohit Verma, PhD

Founding Provost, VinUniversity