BIOGRAPHY
Chuong Nguyen came to the United States as an international student. He studied for 2 years at the Lincoln Trail Community College (LTC) in Illinois (part of the Illinois Eastern Community Colleges, IECC), which got him an Associate of Science. Chuong, enjoys being addressed by his first name (his homeland’s tradition), then applied to transfer to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and got accepted in both. Couldn’t stand the cold and windy weather in Illinois, he decided to come to UCLA to pursue a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science.
It took Chuong almost 3 years at UCLA to complete his B.S. He became a Permanent Resident while staying at UCLA (meaning tuition & fees reduction, what a relief for him!). During the course of his undergraduate education, he worked as a part-time software engineer at Koders Inc., an early-stage start-up company (which was acquired by Black Duck Software in 2008), and full-time at Microsoft Corporation in Summer 2005. He held a leadership position, Vice President, of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Chapter at UCLA, a Computer Science organization on campus while he was an undergrad. Chuong then joined PriceGrabber.com, an online shopping comparison service, full-time as a software engineer for the first 6 months of 2006 (they are just down the street from UCLA, 5-10 minutes bus away). During that period, he got accepted to the Master program in Computer Science at UCLA, and also got another Summer offer at Microsoft for the year 2006. He decided to take the Microsoft’s offer and worked as a Program Manager in that Summer. He came back to UCLA for his Master in the Fall 2006.
Chuong enjoyed his teaching career as a Teaching Assistant for many courses during the graduate program, ranging from Introduction to Programming, Data Structures, Software Engineering, Probability Theory, to Entrepreneurship. The M.S. degree took him roughly 2 years. In the Winter 2008, he took a quarter off (on Leave of Absence) to go back to Vietnam, his homeland, visiting and conducting some businesses. After the trip, he resumed his study, mainly to finish the Master Comprehensive Project. He also applied and got accepted to advance to the Ph.D. program once he had finished his M.S.
So, Chuong began his Ph.D. education in the Fall 2008. Since he transferred from an M.S. to a Ph.D., course-wise speaking, his timing in the program was equivalent to a typical 3rd year Ph.D. student at the time. He joined the Technical Entrepreneur Community (TEC) as an Executive Board Member in the year of 2008. Chuong then became the Executive Board Director and spent his free time leading the organization. While pursuing his Ph.D., besides continuing his work as a Teaching Assistant in some quarters, he held a part-time Producer title in 2009 at Qtask, a start-up SaaS company, and engaged in various consulting activities.
Chuong Nguyen intends to complete his Ph.D. in about 3 years, if not sooner. Meaning he has to pass the Written Qualifying Exam (WQE), advances to candidacy and starts working on his dissertation as soon as possible.