In an auditorium brimming with a sea of the country’s brightest young scholars attending prestigious universities like Georgetown and the University of California, Berkeley, Tiffany Dang recalls looking around, and asking herself, “What am I doing here? Am I really at their level?”
Dang, a recent graduate from City College of San Francisco, was the only student from a community college to win this year’s National Security Education Program Award, which she accepted during a ceremony in Washington, D.C., this June. It was an honor that also included scholarship money worth $20,000 to study one year at Nanjing University and Beijing University in China.
The application process was complex and rigorous, but Dang’s NSEP advisor, Sue Light, former Dean of International Relations at City College of San Francisco, saw her true potential.
“She’s a very bright girl and focused. If she has an idea that she is going to do something, she will,” Light says, also noting that this experience to study abroad is an enormous benefit to community college students like Dang. “I know we have very brilliant students here, and we don’t have a lot to offer them, except helping them get into good universities. Something like this really brings them out of the woodwork.”
Dang, 22, who is now enrolled at UC Berkeley’s International Relations program as a junior, will begin her studies in China this spring.
Although Dang was born and raised in San Francisco, her parents are Chinese, and they lived in Cambodia until they immigrated to the United States before she was born. As a child of immigrants, Dang has seen her family struggle to make ends meet. Her parents took on menial jobs as dishwashers, babysitters and store clerks — any job that required minimal English language skills.
“Even though they tried to go to the community college and learn English, they couldn’t stay in class because of the work load at home and trying to make a living at the same time,” Dang says. “They understand some English, but hope that their kids can assimilate, so it could help out in the future.”
