Inspiring grad: Amy Vongonh

As a Chicago native, Amy Vongonh already was familiar with UIC when she enrolled. She’d visited on school field trips, and her parents encouraged her to envision herself as a UIC student one day. In high school, biology was her favorite subject, and she liked UIC’s variety of science and technology programs.

On Dec. 13, she’ll graduate with a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. With a goal of attending graduate school for biomedical engineering, she plans to apply next year for UIC’s post-baccalaureate program in biological sciences and work as a teaching assistant.

At UIC, Vongonh wanted to make connections just as much as she wanted to study science.

“I always felt like I was lacking community,” Vongonh said. “The high school I came from was very diverse, but I was one of the few Asian people there. So I really wanted to meet more people from my community and understand my identity more.”

Vongonh not only found her community — especially after in-person classes resumed at the start of 2022, following the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic — but strengthened it as a place of connection and support for the Asian and Asian American students who will come after her.

It started with discovering that UIC’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Engagement offered a paid internship — 10 hours a week working on a community-based project with the UIC Asian American Resource and Cultural Center.

As one experience led to another, Vongonh made more connections. For her internship at the cultural center, she and a partner canvassed Asian and Asian American communities and organizations in the Chicagoland area to learn about and share information on events.

The culmination was a field trip they organized to the National Cambodian Heritage Museum in the Albany Park neighborhood. About 15 students went and learned about Cambodian culture and history and walked through the museum’s memorial to victims of the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s.

“It’s actually the only memorial of the Cambodian genocide in the country,” Vongonh said. At the memorial, people can pay their respects and leave flowers in memory of their loved ones. “It’s constantly getting added to because community members will come in and say, ‘My family member passed; can you please add their name?’” she said.

Vongonh is half Laotian and half Cambodian, but her culture wasn’t a big part of growing up, she said. At UIC, she discovered more of her background as she worked with the cultural center and took enough classes to qualify for a global Asian studies minor.

For one of those classes, she interviewed her mother about the genocide. It’s a taboo topic, Vongonh said, because of the pain it resurfaces. Yet the conversation brought them closer.

“I think those 25 minutes of that interview really unlocked things for her that she had never really talked about with anybody before,” Vongonh remembered. “It was, in a way, nice that she was able to talk about it with me, to talk about history that may have been buried because of a lot of hurt and pain.”

When her internship ended, Vongonh wanted to continue working with the Asian American Resource and Cultural Center, located on Maxwell Street not far from Flames Field. They offered her a job as an office aide and member of the outreach team, where she plans and hosts events and contributes to the center’s social media.

For the last few years, she’s been a mentor in the Asian American Mentor Program at the cultural center. She and a partner mentor guide a group of first-year and transfer students as they acclimate to college. They take a seminar class with their mentees on topics from an Asian American perspective, from identity and stereotypes to relationships. As a teaching fellow in the mentor program, Vongonh and her partner teach mentees about other subjects from an Asian American perspective: dating, mental health, activism and more.

With encouragement from staff at the cultural center, Vongonh traveled to Wichita, Kansas, in 2023 to lead a workshop on Asian American identity at the Midwest Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Students Union Conference. The title of her workshop was “Deconstructing AAPI/NHPI/APIDA Labels.”

“I just didn’t think I had the ability to create a workshop and host one and travel to go show other students what I’ve learned at school and what I know,” Vongonh said. One thing she learned at the conference: UIC is unique in the variety of cultural centers and resources it has on campus.

“UIC is for anyone,” she said. “I think there will always be a place and an area for you to fit in and engage with others who have similar experiences to you. Our campus and our students here are very diverse.”