Formed as a young local university, Tra Vinh University (TVU) has soon become a prestigious and top-quality university in the region.
The person who “paved the way” for that success is Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pham Tiet Khanh. He has realized “Bringing quality learning opportunities to the community” and acted according to the core value “Dedication – Transparency – Creativeness – Friendliness” towards a green-smart university in the Southwest region.
Starting from the dawn
Being quiet with great ambition and desire to contribute to the community, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pham Tiet Khanh is always willing to listen and recruit talented people and welcome people from all over the world to come to Tra Vinh and TVU. With his simple and intimate characteristics, he always listens, understands, and puts his staff in the right
position to share the same goal of building TVU into one of the centers of training, scientific research, and community-oriented cooperation, having great attraction not only in the Southwest region but also nationwide and in the world. At TVU, all generations of lecturers and students call him Mr. Khanh to express their love and respect for him.
In May 1992, Tra Vinh province was re-established. There were no professional training institutions. The need for a training and vocational education institution to develop the socio-economic conditions of the province was set forth. On October 21, 1992, Tra Vinh Vocational School was established. After that, the project of Establishing Tra Vinh Community College was implemented. On August 3rd, 2001, Tra Vinh Community College was supported by Canada to deploy; and Mr. Khanh was assigned the responsibility of the school’s principal, operating according to the model of colleges – universities of North American countries, with the aims of providing diverse and flexible training programs, associated with businesses, community, and social needs.
Carrying a great responsibility with the Party Committee, the People’s Committee, and the local people, Mr. Khanh has steered the school to overcome enormous challenges, including the lack of professional human resources, the dependence of financial resources on the central government, and different limitation on infrastructure such as bridges, roads, electricity, etc.
Facing many difficulties, in his mind, Principal Pham Tiet Khanh had only one thought that anyway he had to promote the internal strength of the collective, make the most of the modern educational administration model, and mobilize diverse cooperative relationships in the country and abroad, in order to develop the school meeting the needs of training, research and quality science and technology transfer to serve the community in Tra Vinh, the Southwest region and the whole country.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pham Tiet Khanh and the school staff persisted in the goal of turning Tra Vinh University into a prestigious and top-quality training, scientific research, and technology transfer center in the region.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pham Tiet Khanh’s imprint was associated with the formation and development of TVU in an effort to affirm the image and brand of a multi-level, multi-disciplinary, multi-field, community-based training model by remarkable education quality, scale, training, facilities, and partnerships, resulting in outstanding achievements, which was the innovative thinking and timely changing perception of the organization on human resource management, in line with the development of the times.
Making the dream become true
The determination of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pham Tiet Khanh and staff created pride for TVU. Many localities know about Tra Vinh province partly thanks to TVU. Both training and scientific research have got stable strides. Up to now, TVU has about 20,000 students from 40 provinces in the country; and many Cambodian students are also studying at the university.
In addition to training 51 undergraduate majors, the school has 27 majors at the master’s level, 10 majors at the doctoral level, and 5 specialized training majors at level 1: Internal Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Pediatrics, and Odonto-Stomatology. The university has its own hospital for students and faculty to practice, research, and serve the community.
TVU has hundreds of scientific research topics, many of which have great international significance, such as compiling and putting into use the Vietnamese – Khmer and Khmer – Vietnamese bilingual dictionaries. TVU also chaired many national and ministerial-level projects on the culture of the Southwest region.
Especially, research works on Khmer culture have contributed to the development and proposal of policies to promote sustainable development for ethnic communities in the Mekong Delta. Many studies helped the development of clean agriculture in the West, such as the successful raising of disease-free black tiger shrimp broodstock, culturing successfully makapuno embryos, creating of drought-resistant rice varieties, manufacturing the device to determine the percentage of wax of makapuno, and the application of IoT technology to the rice field, etc.
Since 2013, TVU has been a pioneer in the whole country to sign the Talloires Declaration committed to building a comprehensive green university. For many years in a row, UI GreenMetric has ranked in the top 200 sustainable, environmentally friendly green universities. The World’s Universities with Real Impact ranked TVU 62nd in the Top 100 Universities with a positive impact and contribution to society – WURI Ranking 2022, ranked 17th (up 9 places compared to the previous year 2021), ranked 15th in the Top 50 for the value of entrepreneurship and innovation. TVU is also the top university in the Mekong Delta with many programs that have achieved international education quality accreditation according to the quality standards of AUN-QA, FIBAA, ABET…
TVU’s success bears the mark of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pham Tiet Khanh. Currently, with the new role of President of the University Council, the passion for dedicating to the homeland and TVU is still burning in his heart.
Sitting on the old motorbike and considering it a “two-wheeler convertible” to run around the school to see the positive change of the university day by day are his habits that still remained since he was the principal. Prof. Dr. Pham Tiet Khanh understands deeply that TVU keeps a very important role in higher education in Tra Vinh province and the Mekong Delta.
“TVU has achieved its current success thanks to the great merits of a collective determined to create change with the support of leaders of departments, localities, and central. As a university in a small province, to be named on the academic map, TVU needs to seize opportunities, promote collective intelligence, foster and attract talents, go up with firm steps, and affirm itself with society by prestige and quality. We are always aware of that. Therefore, the insiders’ responsibility is to make more efforts to help TVU grow stronger. All of the school teachers and staff have to do their best together, continue the tradition, continue to bring TVU to sustainable development, reach the international level in the next eras.” – Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pham Tiet Khanh shared.
My Nhien
