At the age of 20, Molena received multiple acceptance letters and graduate assistantships from both the Pure and Applied Mathematics PhD programs. After careful consideration, she was honored to officially start her journey towards the Ph.D. Degree at the age of 21, as an incoming first-year Ph.D. Student in (Pure) Mathematics at North Carolina State University, which she fondly referred to as her most treasured and remarkable _.phdjourneyat21._
In depth, Molena's most admired and honorable _.phdjourneyat21._ stems from her beginnings as a secondary school student specializing in English at Tran Dai Nghia High School For The Gifted at the age of 15. She then transitioned to become a high school student specializing in Vietnamese Literature at VNU-HCM High School For The Gifted, one of the top-tier high schools in Vietnam. At the age of 17, she received the acceptance letters and full-ride scholarships from multiple undergraduate programs in English and English Literature in the United States. At the age of 18, she received her last academic award in Vietnamese Literature, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, before moving to the United States. Two years later, at the age of 20, Molena received the acceptance letters and graduate assistantships from multiple Ph.D. programs in both Pure and Applied Mathematics. To prepare for a smooth transition to the (Pure) Mathematics PhD Program, she also participated in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program during the Spring semester of 2021. At the age of 23, she successfully completed her second year in the Ph.D. program in Applied Mathematics, passed all required written qualifying exams, finished one of her most memorable semesters in graduate school, with a GPA of 4.1665 out of 4.0000, and received her Master of Science Degree in Applied Mathematics.
▪️ How to reach Molena: 
▪️ Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
▪️ Earlier, I was fortunate to receive the opportunities to present my single-author paper titled “Take-Away Impartial Combinatorial Games on Hypergraphs and Other Related Geometric and Discrete Structures” (DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.2203.09696) at six different SIAM conferences. During the Spring semester of 2022, I presented that research at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP22), the SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification (UQ22), and the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM22). During the Fall semester of 2021, I presented that research at the Young Mathematicians Conference (YMC21), the SIAM Southeastern Atlantic Section Annual Meeting (SEAS21), and the Annual SIAM Central States Section Conference (CSS21).
▪️ Subsequently, I received two National Science Foundation Funded Ph.D. Research Internships to work in two different lab rotations. During these internships, I learned how to utilize the High Performance Computing clusters, and the GPUs to solve problems in different fields, from Computational Biology, to Computer Science, Electrical, and Computer Engineering.
▪️ Lastly, I have been a representative for the Society of Industrial Applied Mathematics (SIAM) at the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Student Chapter since September 2022. In January of 2022, I was a project mentor at the "Tenth Annual Conference to Increase Diversity in Mathematical Modeling and Public Health" (2022 MIDAS-CCDD), which was hosted by the MIDAS Coordination Center in cooperation with the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD) at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. In October of 2021, I was a conference moderator at the Graduates Achieving Inclusion Now (GAIN) Conference on measuring graduate students' success, allyship, and mentorship.