Posted on May 7, 2026 by Sean M. Wood
By nearly any metric, Khanh Nguyen finished school 15 years ago.
Nguyen enrolled in the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2007 and earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 2011. The help she received from her advisers led her to work with undergraduates. She started at the University of Texas at Arlington before coming back to UT San Antonio to work in One Stop Enrollment Services.
“Anytime you called UT San Antonio, I was one of six people that were going to answer the phone,” Nguyen said.
She had a degree. She had a job. She also had questions.
“I transferred from enrollment services to financial aid for four or five years,” Nguyen said. “Then, after a while, it got kind of stagnant. It got to the point where I wondered, ‘Is this all there is?’”
She called it her “quarter-life crisis.” It was 2017. She was 28, had been with her husband since 2011, had a 4-year-old son, and a routine job. Nguyen needed a challenge and decided to get another undergraduate degree. As someone who loved math and science, she was torn between physics and electrical engineering. Both were interesting and both were difficult.
Nguyen chose electrical engineering, “because it was practical and technical and hands-on. It’s building and not just learning.”
She was able to get a job in the Electrical Engineering Department as a program coordinator. She opted to work full time and go to school part time for her electrical engineering. It ultimately tookher eight years.
“It was a big commitment going back to school and working full time, knowing I have a kid at home,” Nguyen said. “Plus, I’m married, so that’s a whole relationship that you have to keep in mind. And in the background, I’m helping take care of my elderly dad. He’s in his 70s and he doesn’t speak English very well, so I have to translate for him. But I just had to go back to school.”
It’s something she said she should have been doing all her life. Growing up in rural Bexar County meant you had to fix things yourself when necessary.
“I was around my uncle who fixed his own cars, fixed his own plumbing or my mom who fixed our own house when things go wrong,” Nguyen said. “She rewired circuits when the lights weren’tworking. She fixed the lamp. I was there watching them do all this. I was like that weird curious kid that didn’t go out and play with kids. I was there holding the light when he was fixing his car, orstanding behind my mom when she was putting together or fixing these lamps and rewiring stuff.”
She said there was always a “junk pile” for spare parts to tinker with. “I wasn’t thinking that I was a scientist or engineer. It was, I guess, undervaluing what I was or what I could be.”
Nguyen said she’s glad for the anthropology degree she got 15 years ago. “It opened my eyes and made me a more well-rounded person in general. It gave me a holistic perspective of the whole world and people and culture. I found that really fascinating from a social aspect. And going into education, that was really helpful with being open-minded and considerate of other people's cultures and background.”
Nguyen already has a new job as an EPIC Analyst with University Health System. EPIC is University’s electronic hospital record system. Working on the system allows her to keep helping people, like she did when working for the universities. It’s also a technical skill, which is the reason she got her engineering degree.
“It’s an optimization of processing,” she said. “I’ve also worked in administrative jobs so long, I understand bureaucracy and I understand processes. I understand how people think and what is going to be helpful to communicate information to them.”
Nguyen said she is hopeful that other people read or hear her story and decide to pursue dreams they have put on hold. Being a 37-year-old wife with a full-time job and the mother of a teenager should not stand in anyone’s way of pursuing their dreams.
“It’s up to you to decide if you’re done,” she said. “It might seem to others that you’re through, but that’s your call. I had a degree. I wasn’t 22, going out into the woods for the first time, figuring these things out. I’ve learned that you can just keep going. This isn’t the end. You don’t have a stopping point.”
— Sean M. Wood
