Yen Le 

University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business

“A passionate innovator with a heart for Vietnam and an avid long-distance walker.”

Hometown: Da Nang, Vietnam

Fun Fact About Yourself: I met President Obama twice during my professional fellowship with the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative. 

Undergraduate School and Major: Monash University – Melbourne Australia. Major: Business – Banking & Finance

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Nordic Coder, CEO & Founder

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: When I was given the opportunity to join a publicly listed Swedish venture-building firm as a founder to launch a coding school in Vietnam, I jumped at the chance. I knew it would be challenging but would reward me with exponential learning. I am very proud to have built a strong team of doers who worked together to bring the company closer to break-even within 13 months of inception. Within the first year, we trained over 500 experienced developers and non-coding background professionals.

What quality best describes the MBA classmates you’ve met so far and why? My classmates share my enthusiasm for learning and drive for success. They also genuinely care about each other; they seem collaborative rather than competitive and always offer help to one another. The Notre Dame alumni network is known for its tight-knit community. After only a few weeks here, I understand how collegiality was formed on this campus.

Mendoza is known as a purpose-driven MBA program that asks students to “Ask More of Business.” What is your mission and how will Mendoza help you realize it? I wanted to work in or even create a work environment with a societal purpose and impact that can efficiently co-exist with an awareness of the bottom line. Mendoza’s program offers me a unique opportunity to explore and reflect on the business and leadership approach I want to pursue, in an academic environment that emphasizes ethics as well as good business.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key factor that led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA and why was it so important to you? I chose Mendoza because the school places emphasis on integrity in every business decision made and makes sure that leaders of the future understand how to use business to improve communities rather than solely focusing on the bottom line. I come from a place recovering from the economic devastation of war that is slowly opening to creating business opportunities for its own citizens and for responsible outside investors. One of Mendoza’s course offerings that is directly on point is Business on the Frontlines, where students have a chance to examine the impact of business in regions affected by extreme poverty and conflict. I look forward to solving these problems with my project team and drive positive changes in my home country and other places with similar histories and needs.

What club or activity are you looking most forward to in business school? I most look forward to joining the Consulting Club and Tech/Business Analytics Club in order to further explore these areas. I would also like to be engaged with the entrepreneur community in the area through the IDEA center, the fundamental resource for all commercialization and entrepreneurial activities of the university.

What was the most challenging question you were asked during the admissions process? I was asked to write an essay about “a time in my life or career when I had to overcome an obstacle, start over, or rebuild.”

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point in your career? While building and leading a team from the ground up taught me a lot of painful lessons about management in the early days of a company, I often asked myself how corporate leaders design and maintain an organizational structure that helps them achieve consistently high growth for the long term. This MBA experience certainly would help me gain more knowledge about different industries in North America and bring these practices back to Vietnam and the APAC region where I plan to work after MBA. This would also open doors for me to explore a completely different environment from what I was used to before.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? As a recipient of the Fulbright scholarship, I was recommended to four programs by the Fulbright committee, including Mendoza at Notre Dame, University of Indiana – Kelley School of Business, University of Minnesota – Carlson School of Management, and Syracuse University.

How did you determine your fit at various schools? I mainly spoke to MBA graduates to understand the profiles of students in each school and evaluate the alumni network. As I am using this MBA program to refine my goals, I also looked at whether I can be exposed to different career paths and examined the opportunities to participate in other non-traditional MBA activities.

What was your defining moment and how did it shape who you are? When I accepted the offer to found and build a company from scratch, nobody believed I could do it; even my family thought I would fail. I decided that I would be able to learn most when I pushed myself further from my comfort zone. Learning to accept the risk of failure gave me the courage to deal with uncertainty and build more resilience as I coped with constant roller-coaster ride between everyday success and disaster in the early days of the company. It made me a stronger person and allowed me to take on new challenges.

Where do you see yourself in ten years?  In ten years’ time, I aspire to become a leader of a driven team working on a tech product that helps make quality education more accessible to everyone, especially to the community back home in Vietnam.