Ho Chi Minh City CET Vietnam’s home base is in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest and most market-oriented city. Life in Ho Chi Minh City is colorful and vibrant, with high-energy street scenes juxtaposed with several hundred years of tradition. While in Ho Chi Minh City, students can take advantage of the city’s numerous resources--universities, NGO’s, non-profits, etc.--for their service-learning placements before venturing on a traveling seminar through central Vietnam in the fall and spring, or traveling to rural areas to do community service in the summer.
Campus CET’s overseas partner is Hong Bang University, accredited by the Vietnamese Ministry of Education. Students study Vietnamese language at Vietnamese Language Studies Saigon (VLS), Hong Bang’s affiliate. Located in the heart of the city, VLS offers excellent learning facilities and employs some of the best-trained language teachers in Vietnam. The CET Center is conveniently located near VLS.
Vietnamese Roommates CET students live with Vietnamese roommates in a student guesthouse. Past CET students agree that living with a local roommate is one of the highlights of studying abroad, as it allows them to experience local student life as authentically as possible. Vietnamese roommates are selected from a number of prestigious institutions in Ho Chi Minh City and participate in CET activities.
Housing and Meals Semester students should expect simple but comfortable conditions in the guesthouse. Rooms typically include basic furnishings, air-conditioning, private telephones and small refrigerators. There is WiFi available at the guesthouse and internet cafes are inexpensive and plentiful. There are also computers at the CET center available for student use.
Most semester students eat with fellow students and roommates at one of the downtown area’s many restaurants, which offer delicious food at low cost. Students occasionally have group meals at the guesthouse or during the traveling seminars.
Summer students can expect more rustic accommodations and simple food in the countryside. During the Ho Chi Minh City segment of the summer program, students are provided with a meal stipend that covers 2 to 3 meals/day. At the worksite, students typically eat group meals cooked by a local villager.
Traveling Seminars and Excursions CET arranges a wide variety of extracurricular classes designed to deepen connections to Vietnamese culture, such as bamboo flute, calligraphy or cooking. In addition, weekly academic excursions might include seeing the famous tunnels of the “American War” resistance village of Cu Chi, speaking with doctors about health care issues at a local clinic, visiting an industrial park to discuss environmental issues or interacting with locals in a minority village.
During the fall and spring terms, students attend a traveling seminar through central Vietnam. The traveling seminar highlights themes from courses and students visit both major sites and the homes of local villagers. Activities include visiting archeological vestiges of the ancient Cham civilization, cooking local dishes with a Hoi An native, spending a rural overnight in Quang Tri and touring the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi.
During the Summer Service in Rural Vietnam program, students visit sites that highlight the history and culture of the area where they are based, like historical ruins thousands of years old, battle sites from the "American War," or performances that showcase local dance.
During the fall and spring terms, students attend a traveling seminar through central Vietnam. The traveling seminar highlights themes from courses and students visit both major sites and the homes of local villagers. Activities include visiting archeological vestiges of the ancient Cham civilization, cooking local dishes with a Hoi An native, spending a rural overnight in Quang Tri and touring the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi.