This story is part of a series highlighting the university’s outstanding graduates crossing the stage on May 16.
By nearly any metric, Khanh Nguyen finished school 15 years ago.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 2011, she went to work at UT Arlington, helping advise undergraduates. However, not long after, she returned to UT San Antonio to work in the One Stop Enrollment Center.
“Anytime you called UT San Antonio, I was one of six people that were going to answer the phone,” Nguyen said.
She had a degree. She had a job. But she also had questions.
“I transferred from enrollment services to financial aid for four or five years,” Nguyen said. “Then, after a while, it got kind of stagnant. It got to the point where I wondered, ‘Is this all there is?’”
She called it her “quarter-life crisis.” It was 2017. Nguyen was 28, had been with her husband since 2011 and had a 4-year-old son. She also had a steady job, but what she needed most in her life was a new challenge.
That’s when she decided to pursue another undergraduate degree. As someone who loved math and science, she was torn between physics and electrical engineering. Both were interesting, and both would be difficult.
Nguyen eventually chose electrical engineering, “because it was practical and technical and hands-on. It’s building and not just learning.”
She secured a job in the Department of Electrical Engineering as a program coordinator, opting to work full-time and go to school part-time in pursuit of a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.
It’s a journey that ultimately took her eight years to complete. This May, Nguyen will cross the Commencement stage for a second time with her new degree.
It wasn’t easy. She had to juggle several responsibilities and obligations along the way.
“It was a big commitment — going back to school and working full time, knowing I have a kid at home,” Nguyen said. “Plus, I’m married, so that’s a whole relationship that you have to keep in mind. And in the background, I’m helping take care of my elderly dad. He’s in his 70s and he doesn’t speak English very well, so I have to translate for him. But I just had to go back to school.”
A lifelong engineer
Nguyen never felt out of place in UT San Antonio’s Electrical Engineering program. After all, growing up in rural Bexar County meant you had to fix things yourself when necessary.
“I was around my uncle who fixed his own cars, fixed his own plumbing or my mom who fixed our own house when things go wrong,” Nguyen said. “She rewired circuits when the lights weren’t working. She fixed the lamp. I was there watching them do all this. I was like that weird curious kid that didn’t go out and play with kids. I was there holding the light when he was fixing his car or standing behind my mom when she was putting together or fixing these lamps and rewiring stuff.”
She said there was always a “junk pile” for spare parts to tinker with.
“I wasn’t thinking that I was a scientist or engineer. It was, I guess, undervaluing what I was or what I could be,” Nguyen said.
A younger Nguyen would likely be impressed by what she’s accomplished over the last year. Recently, Nguyen and her student teammates designed a solar rechargeable flood monitoring and alert system, which was presented at the university’s Spring 2026 Tech Symposium.
The system, called Water Watch, was designed to help address the significant threat that flooding poses to communities, which can often result in property damage and loss of life.
The project proposes a real-time alert system that utilizes ultrasonic and air-temperature sensors combined with a camera and audio/visual actuators to provide early warning to property owners. The system is built using wirelessly-linked microcontrollers connected to sensors and actuators that continuously monitor rising water levels. Flood alerts are transmitted to a central hub for analysis and distribution, ensuring users are promptly notified when a flood event is occurring.
The team earned an Excellence in Engineering award for their project.
The next chapter
Though she is earning a second degree, Nguyen says she will always be thankful for the anthropology degree she earned 15 years ago.
“It opened my eyes and made me a more well-rounded person in general. It gave me a holistic perspective of the whole world and people and culture,” Nguyen said. “I found that really fascinating from a social aspect. And going into education, that was really helpful with being open-minded and considerate of other people’s cultures and background.”
Nguyen will now apply the same perspectives that suited her well in higher education to a career in healthcare. She’s already landed a new job as an EPIC Analyst with University Health System. Working with EPIC, the hospital’s electronic record system, will give her the opportunity to keep helping people.
Doing so also requires great technical skill, which is the reason she got her engineering degree.
“It’s an optimization of processing,” she explained. “I’ve also worked in administrative jobs so long, I understand bureaucracy and I understand processes. I understand how people think and what is going to be helpful to communicate information to them.”
Now 37 years old and the mother of a teenager, Nguyen said she is hopeful that when other people read or hear her story, they are inspired to pursue the dreams they have put on hold.
“It’s up to you to decide if you’re done,” she said. “It might seem to others that you’re through, but that’s your call. I had a degree. I wasn’t 22, going out into the woods for the first time, figuring these things out. I’ve learned that you can just keep going. This isn’t the end. You don’t have a stopping point.”
