Before I became a product designer, I was supposed to become an architect. It wasn't a dramatic “I was born to be” story. It was more personal than that.

My dad really wanted to become an architect. But life did what life usually does: opened too many tabs, crashed the system, and that dream never fully happened for him.

So I decided to carry his dream and studied architecture at Hanoi Architectural University. Partly for myself, partly for him. For a while, it looked like the plan was working. I designed Rehab CampMuseumHotel ...

Then in my 3rd year, something unexpected happened. I got my first UI/UX design job with salary of 1.5 million VND ($60) per month. A very small number. But somehow, it became a very big turning point.

Somehow, that $60/month job didn't scare me off. It taught me. I learned Figma by Googling, shipped things by guessing, and presented designs to stakeholders while quietly hoping nobody would ask too many questions.

I left architecture school without finishing the blueprint. But I walked into product design with something most designers don't have: five years of thinking about how people move through space, how structures hold weight, and why a bad layout makes people feel lost before they even realize it.

Now I work as a product designer. I obsess over spacing, argue about 4px versus 8px, and occasionally explain to a developer why "just move it a little to the left" is a real design decision. The usual. It's not the career my dad dreamed of. But it's the one that somehow kept finding me — and at some point, I stopped running from it.