Vietnamese student among 4 globally to win full scholarship to Australia's Monash

Chu Thanh Tu, a 12th-grade student of English at the Hanoi - Amsterdam High School, received news of winning the Monash International Leadership Scholarship on April 17.

According to the information on its website, the university awards the scholarship to four international students each year.

Tu says: "I am extremely happy. I was accepted to the commerce program."

Monash University ranks 37th in the world and fifth in Australia in the 2025 QS World University Rankings by British organization Quacquarelli Symonds.

Tu also got a scholarship from the University of Sydney and was accepted to the University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland, all in Australia.

She started preparing for her application while in ninth grade, focusing on her studies and actively participating in extracurricular activities.

Thanks to her efforts and planning, she achieved a GPA of 9.9/10 and scored 1590/1600 in SAT and 8.0 in IELTS.

Chu Thanh Tu in a potrait photo she provides.

In terms of extracurricular activities, one of Tu's standout projects was her green tea distribution venture in 2022.

She says her family owns a tea garden in Hanoi's outlying district of Thach That.

Occasionally she would go there to pick tea leaves and sell them to families living nearby.

She was also interested in matcha, the finely ground powder made from green tea leaves, a famous Japanese product.

During a visit to a tea artisan's shop in Thai Nguyen Province, renowned as a major tea-growing region and having vast plantations and a long history of cultivation, with her mother, Tu learned about Vietnam's tea culture, its love for tea plants and the products derived from them.

Inspired, she and her brother came up with the idea for a tea-related project.

The main goal of the project was to spread the culture of Vietnamese tea drinking among young people and help farmers bring clean products to consumers.

Tu went to a cooperative in Thai Nguyen, where workers taught her how to care for tea plants, and she participated in every step of the production process to thoroughly understand it.

After that she and her brother registered a social enterprise named Máttrà -- pronounced like "matcha" and meaning "cool, refreshing tea" in Vietnamese -- with their father listed as the owner since they were both below 18.

The cooperative handled production, while she and her brother distributed the product.

"Máttrà is both my favorite drink and signifies refreshing green tea," Tu says.

She designed the logo for the product.

Her parents supported them financially, buying a tea roasting machine and organizing an event to introduce the Vietnamese tea culture to students at their farm.

Tu says her parents encouraged and facilitated their efforts, while the two siblings planned and executed everything themselves.

"The hardest part was promoting and selling the product."

In 2023 the matcha product was launched, and Tu sold it on her personal Facebook and ecommerce platform Shopee and at various local fairs. A 100-gram packet was priced at VND140,000 (US$5.39).

But they could only get one or two orders a week, which Tu says was because of the abundance of similar products at low prices.

Although she was disappointed, the experience helped Tu realize that entrepreneurship and business involve the risk of failure, and the key is to rise from it.

She continued to explore ways to introduce the product, build a stable customer base, primarily consisting of family and friends, who wanted to use matcha for drinks or baking.

Tu used the profits earned from the tea business for charitable purposes. She returned to the raw material region in Thai Nguyen and provided scholarships worth VND1 million each to 10 underprivileged children. Last year she also donated VND5 million to support a sick child from Dien Bien who came to Hanoi for treatment.

"I want to do charity through my own hard work," she says.

She also submitted her project to the INOVA Croatia 2024 International Invention and Innovation Competition and won a gold medal in the entrepreneurship category.

This achievement was a highlight in her application to Australian universities.

Monash University does not require applicants to submit an essay for the scholarship, which is based on academic performance and extracurricular activities.

In her interview with the university earlier in April, she was asked about her contributions to the community.

Kate Pham, Tu's advisor, says besides academic achievements, Tu's application also stood out because of her extracurricular project related to tea.

This aligns with Monash University's scholarship criteria, which seek applicants with leadership potential—those who not only excel academically but are also willing to think creatively, take action and help their communities.

At the end of July Tu will head to Australia to begin her course.

She also hopes to secure a scholarship for a master's degree after graduation.

As for the tea project, she plans to hire staff to help and manage it remotely along with her brother.