Forging the Future

Posted April 20, 2016

Tammy VuPham, a freshman in the Ivan Allen College School of Public Policy, was featured in Forging the Future, a multimedia piece highlighting Georgia Tech freshmen with unique backgrounds. Tammy’s feature is republished below, and an accompanying video interview with her can be viewed on YouTube.

Tammy VuPham is the daughter of Vietnam War refugees. She speaks Vietnamese and English as heritage languages, but has also taught herself Spanish, French, and Arabic.

She was selected as one of two students to represent Georgia as a high school senior in the United States Youth Senate and traveled to our nation’s capital to meet with President Obama and several members of his Cabinet and Congress. Tammy was selected because of her commitment to public service.

Throughout high school, she worked with refugees resettling in Atlanta. Tammy helped create a partnership that matched girls from her high school with girls at a school in Atlanta for refugees to help them navigate the process of getting acclimated to a new country.

“Many refugees choose to come to Atlanta because of how multicultural it is,” Tammy explains. “When making the choice to go to Georgia Tech, I made sure that I would be entrenched in this community because I have a passion for it.”

As part of that decision, Tammy also chose public policy as her major and plans to devote her life to public service primarily in the field of healthcare policy. Knowing how hard her own family has worked to allow her the opportunity to come to Georgia Tech pushes Tammy to want to give back to others. “For me what’s most important is my leadership through my service, especially my service to others, those that won’t be able to speak up for themselves.” she says.