KINGSTON, R.I. – Dec. 12, 2024 – Anna-Trang Truong came to the University of Rhode Island in the fall of 2020 with her game plan written, seemingly carved in stone.

Her mother, Ha Tran, was a certified nursing assistant; her sister, Quyen, was on her way to graduating from URI with a nursing degree; and Anna, only in high school, already had a solid resume in health care. She was a CNA, and had interned at Hasbro Children’s Hospital and worked in nursing homes.

“I’ll be a nurse,” thought Anna, who grew up in Woonsocket. “It’s a simple, direct track.”

But two years in, things weren’t working as she had hoped. An honors student in high school, she was falling short in her nursing classes and having second thoughts about the profession as she saw nurses overworked during the pandemic. She faced a “life-changing decision” to switch majors.

Two and a half years later, Truong is not only preparing to graduate with a degree in management from the College of Business but will share her story with more than 550 fellow graduates at URI’s 2024 Fall Commencement on Saturday, Dec. 14, at the Ryan Center at 10 a.m.  And, instead of disappointment, she is excited for the possibilities that await her. 

“It was a drastic decision for me because my entire life was geared toward nursing. So it’s been really hard,” says Truong, a first-generation college graduate whose parents, Tam and Ha Tran, immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam. “But now that I’m in business, it broadens my whole perspective. There are so many options.”

“I want the graduates to feel that they can relate and go through the hardships,” she adds about her speech. “And I want them to realize that there’s beauty in the hardships because everyone goes through them.”

With family members who have mostly majored in STEM fields – including her brother, Joseph, who is an engineering major at URI – Truong, at first, thought the switch to business would be a disappointment. And she worried about starting over and being older than her classmates. But she found the College of Business very welcoming. Many of her classes were small, and the professors helped by suggesting course options and focused on learning over grades, she says.

“The counselors helped me out in terms of counting my credits and putting me in the right classes,” she says. “When I told them I didn’t know what I wanted to major in, they were like, ‘Well, just try out everything and then just go from there.’”

She has also found numerous student organizations – and the time to join them. Along with being a member of URI’s Women in Business club and the URI Society of Human Resource Management, she has added to her medical background as a volunteer with URI Emergency Medical Services and honed her leadership skills as a student ambassador and tour guide. She’s also served as co-president of the Ruckus Leadership Team and is proud of how the group has heightened student attendance and involvement at URI sporting events.

Her final semester this fall has been a mad dash. To graduate, she needed to take 19 credits this semester while working two internships – in human resources at South County Hospital and in sales and marketing at a manufacturing company – to help pay for school. 

But the semester has also included a trip to Hawaii to give a final presentation with collaborators from the Universities of Hawaii and Alaska for URI’s Topics in Entrepreneurship and Innovation class. As part of a project with REGENT Craft in Quonset, students were charged to come up with solutions for best equipping the company’s seaglider for medivac operations. 

“I was in a group of students who performed countless interviews and hours of research to create a mission model canvas for our problem statement,” says Truong, who learned she was chosen as commencement speaker while on the trip. “The project forced me to step out of my comfort zone because that’s where I would learn the most.”

As she thinks about her future, she’s considering paths that could lead to management positions in health care, such as working in diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Now that I am on the job pursuit, I realize there are so many other ways to go about that,” she says. “I want to feel like I’m giving back and making a difference.”

When she walks across the stage Saturday, it will be a big moment for her and her family. It may help make up for missing out on graduation from Woonsocket High School, which was canceled because of the pandemic. After finishing high school fourth in her class and being named salutatorian of the vocational school where she took health-care courses, not walking across the stage made her feel that her story wasn’t finished, she says.

To mark the occasion on Saturday, 16 members of her family – parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles – will be in the stands to celebrate her with poster-size photos marking her journey through life. “We’re a huge family and we are all very close,” she says. “We all come together for big events and this group of 16 is actually a smaller representation of everyone who could have come.”

“Now that I get to cross the stage – not only that, now that I get to speak – it’s such an accomplishment for me because of everything that we went through during the pandemic. I wanted to go out with a bang and this was the way to do it.”