The first time I tried to cross a street in Hanoi, I waited for a gap that never came. There were no lights at the intersection, just a steady river of mopeds, cars, and people, none of it stopping. A local told me the trick: don't wait, and don't rush. Walk at a steady pace, and let everyone see where you're going. It felt insane. But it worked. The traffic bent around me without ever stopping. Nobody gives explicit signals in Hanoi traffic. Everyone watches, everyone adjusts, and the whole system depends on each person moving in a way others can read. It took me most of my summer to understand that my lab worked the same way, and that for my first few weeks, I was the one standing frozen at the curb.
A year before Hanoi, I spent a summer in Eswatini helping build a 49-meter footbridge. The project had a basic leadership structure, one person in charge and various “departments” in which people specialized in; construction, safety, quality control… I was in media and logistics which meant managing group expenses and being in control of media so other people could see the project. Being on that project and someone who focused on the media and the portrayal of the project compelled me to watch leadership closely and the different types that exist.
I chose Vietnam, and more specifically VinUniversity because I wanted to immerse myself in a completely different part of the world I had never been to before. Simultaneously however, I wanted to be involved in something worthwhile. Develop my skills as a STEM major and be involved in research that not everyone has the opportunity to be a part of.
I expected it would be similar to Eswatini, guided, structured, being constantly told what to do, albeit digging up a hole, moving rocks or sand piles or just taking photos and videos in general. I was confident I’d be able to get the hang of it, but not very confident in my lab abilities at all, as it was my first ever lab experience. The lab I picked focuses on smart textiles, fabric that can sense touch, that we hope to weave into clothing one day. I worked on the machine-learning side, teaching a computer to read the touch signals.
As I reflect back on my time at VinUniversity, there are three CliftonStrengths that emerged: Woo, Developer, and Adaptability (Rath and Conchie). Woo showed up the most. I get energized by people, and once I'm connected to them I work best wherever I am. But if my work is only boosted when I'm around people, what happens when I cut myself off? I wasn't just lonely. I was cut off from the strength I lean on most.
Developer was also involved to a more subtle degree. I notice progress in other people and in myself, and those small signs of movement kept me motivated.
Adaptability was the whole experience in a word: dropped into a new country and a new field, finding my way through challenges as they came. But going with the flow tips easily into waiting. For my first weeks I waited for the work to make sense, for someone to tell me what to do instead of stepping forward. Watching and going with the flow had always been enough before. Here, it wasn't. Later in the final weeks of the internship I found adaptability being the most helpful strength. It was being adaptable and knowledgeable on many things that made me fit to lead the small research team in the end.
My first real task was a 25-hour video on how to use PyTorch. At first that was fine. I was motivated, I'd flown across the world to learn, with state-of-the-art materials in front of me. But around hour 8, I caught myself not really watching anymore, just keeping it open to look busy in front of everyone else.
With no momentum and nothing to show, the days blurred. The less I had to show, the more I avoided the people who might ask how it was going. And the less I talked to them, the less direction I got, which meant even less to show. Every day I avoided the hard conversation made the next day's harder to have. I was isolating myself, and I was aware of it happening the whole time. I don't think I was lazy or out of place. I'd fallen into something a lot of people fall into.
What I couldn't see at the time was that I was misreading the room. Everyone around me worked quietly and looked completely self-sufficient. Nobody announced when they were stuck or lost, they just kept their heads down and worked hard. Through my own lens I took that to mean everyone knew exactly what they were doing, and that I was the only one drifting. It took me a while to realize I had it backwards. I wasn't reading a room full of people who had it all figured out. I was looking at a room full of people doing exactly what I was doing, looking busy, keeping quiet, not showing when they were unsure. The difference was I assumed everyone else's quiet meant competence, and my own quiet meant I was falling behind. I saw it most clearly with Hieu later on. He had been quietly fighting a measuring setup that couldn't reliably tell whether a fiber was producing a signal, and he never said it wasn't going well or that he needed a hand. He just kept working at it on his own. From the outside he looked like he had it handled, the same way I must have looked, right up until I got a close look at the problem and realized he had been stuck on it for a while.
The one consistent break in the routine was my labmate Hieu, a master's student in the lab. Every so often he would bring me along to watch him extend the fiber, the physical, hands-on side of the project that I would never have seen from behind my screen. He had no reason to. I wasn't his responsibility, and folding in a newcomer who would be gone in eight weeks did nothing for his own work. But he did it anyway.
Those trips were the only times the work felt bigger than my own small lane. I got to see how much was actually happening around me while I sat boxed into mine, the whole pipeline I had no idea existed from the office. And what stuck with me wasn't only what I saw on those trips. It was that Hieu took the initiative at all. He didn't have to pull me in, and he did, and slowly that shifted something. Being brought into it by someone who had no reason to bother made me want to be part of it, instead of watching from the edge. That was the main reason I found the confidence to speak up about wanting more.
Prof. Tung, who runs the lab, pointed me to Dr. Trung, my supervisor, who actually sat down and looked at what I had been working on, then reworked his plan around it. He moved me onto data collection, which meant I was finally in the lab itself instead of the office. From there things moved quickly. Inside the lab the work was nothing like filling time with a video. I had real things that needed doing on a schedule. I would record data, see what wasn't working, and dig into why the model was off. That measuring setup was the first real thing I fixed. I completely rebuilt the system to capture the data on the Arduino side until it could read the signal reliably. It changed more than my own work. Because Hieu could finally trust that a fiber was registering, he could stop sacrificing stability to force a signal and make better fibers, exactly what the project needed then.
After that, the work settled into a rhythm. Most of the problems on my end traced back to the fiber itself, so I would flag it to Hieu, he would fix it, I would improve the recording setup, and the next batch would come back cleaner. Each pass made the next one better, and I finally had a reason to get to the lab as early as I could and stay, talking to whoever came by instead of avoiding them.
That was when the time I had spent on both sides paid off. Everyone knew their own part better than I did, but I had picked up a rough feel for the whole pipeline, and that turned out to be what mattered. Because I could see the process end to end, I was often the one who could pinpoint where it was actually breaking and what to change. The fixes were usually small, but they added up, and being able to make them is what made me useful. Eventually it put me in a position to coordinate the work, a small team of two, plus Prof. Tung.
Two ideas from outside my own experience gave me names for what I saw that summer. The first is Edward Hall's distinction between high-context and low-context communication. In a low-context setting, meaning is stated outright. In a high-context one (105–116), it lives in what people do rather than what they say, and everyone is expected to read it. Hanoi traffic is the purest version of high-context I have ever seen. Nobody signals, everyone watches and adjusts, and it works because each person moves in a way others can read. My lab ran the same way, and for weeks I read it wrong. I saw quiet, heads-down work and decided everyone was fine and I was the odd one out. My own silence was sending a signal too. I meant it as politeness. It landed as I'm content.
The second is Robert Greenleaf's servant leadership, the idea that real leadership can begin from wanting to serve rather than wanting to lead, and that the test of it is whether the people around a leader grow because of them (13). Hieu is the clearest case I have. He had no authority over me and no reason to fold me in, and he did it anyway. He wasn't trying to lead me. He was making room for someone on the edge of the work, and that turned out to be the thing that pulled me in. By the end of the summer I had grown into someone who could actually contribute, and a large part of why was a person who led by serving without ever calling it that. That is the kind of leader I want to be.
The Personal Leadership method (Schaetti et al.) starts with mindfulness, noticing what is happening in yourself in the moment. That summer I had the noticing part down. I was aware of the isolation loop the whole time it was happening, conscious of watching myself do it. What I learned is that noticing isn't enough on its own. Awareness only mattered once I acted on it and stepped off the curb.
One of the most important things I learned during my summer and one that I intend to incorporate into my daily life is acting sooner. I want to make my needs visible early instead of waiting to be read correctly. And I want to be the Hieu for the next person standing at the edge, whether that's as president of the International Students Association, as an upperclassman, or just as a friend to someone new at Cornell.
Another leader worth studying that summer was Prof. Tung. What struck me first was his calm demeanor. I could tell he was always buried in administrative work, yet he never made a student feel like an interruption. He always made time to meet, look at what you were doing, and point you somewhere useful. He saw an opportunity in the work we had already done and showed us how to turn it into a paper, then sat us down for a lecture breaking down how the whole system worked, when he could easily have left us to figure it out. And he cared about merit, making sure people got the credit their work earned rather than letting it disappear up the chain.
What he showed me is that authority and warmth aren't a trade-off. He led from the top, but through patience and generosity rather than pressure. Between him and Hieu, I saw the same instinct from two very different positions, one with authority and one without, both leading by making room for other people.
By the end of the summer that work had turned into something real. We are writing it up now as a paper aimed at IEEE, with me as first author. At its core it advances how Prof. Tung first measured touch on these fibers when he started the project. A few weeks earlier I had been too intimidated to even ask for real work. Now my name is going on it first.
What matters more to me is what kept going after I left. The measuring setup I rebuilt is still what the lab uses to check whether a fiber is registering, so the feedback that let Hieu make better fibers didn't leave when I did. I wrote down the recording setup and the pipeline so the next person doesn't have to piece it together from scratch the way I did. And Hieu is still there, carrying the method forward, making the fibers longer and more stable than they were when I arrived. The part I am proudest of isn't the paper. It is that the lab runs a little better now than it did before I showed up, and it will keep running that way without me.
The research itself lines up most with SDG 9, industry, innovation, and infrastructure. The fibers are a small piece of advanced manufacturing, and the bridge I helped build in Eswatini was infrastructure in the most literal sense. But I want to be honest about what this summer was for me. It was mostly a way to get real lab experience, a step, not a finished contribution to anything. My goals reach further than that.
What I want is to keep gaining experience across as many parts of a problem as I can, the science, the building, the people, so that whatever I end up facing, I have a feel for how the whole thing fits together. Longer term I want to work where the lab meets policy meets people. I don't assume I'll have the answers. I just want to be useful, and to put as many opportunities as possible in reach to as many people as possible.
I think about that intersection often. Leading, it turns out, looks less like directing traffic and more like crossing it, moving with intention, staying readable, and trusting the people around you to adjust. And sometimes, like Hieu, it means being the one who looks out for the person still standing at the curb.
Bibliography
Greenleaf, Robert K. Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. Paulist Press, 1977.
Hall, Edward T. Beyond Culture. Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976.
Rath, Tom, and Barry Conchie. Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow. Gallup Press, 2008.
Schaetti, Barbara F., et al. Personal Leadership: Making a World of Difference: A Methodology of Two Principles and Six Practices. Flying Kite Publications, 2008.