On November 6–7, 2025, our URA team was honored to host an observation session for high-schoolers from Vinschool. It was super valuable! The students not only picked up bite-sized knowledge about modern tech, but also got an early taste of student life at the Computer Science & Engineering department, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology. The event was run by alumni mentors from CSE Summer School, so everything felt smooth and professional from start to finish.
Day 1 (Nov 6th, 2025)
We kicked off with Large Language Models (LLMs) – a topic that instantly grabbed everyone’s attention. Even though using apps like ChatGPT or Grok every day, this was a more technical, behind-the-scenes talk that helped the students actually understand what LLMs are and how to use them effectively.
In the afternoon, it was time to get hands-on with those datasets. Our mentors prepped friendly starter materials to make fine-tuning approachable for first-timers. Even students with zero coding background could actually do a full fine-tune, pretty awesome.
Learning by doing, after soaking up a bunch of new ideas, the Vinschool students jumped right into building their own datasets so they could fine-tune a language model themselves. There were a few bumps along the way (as expected!), but with guidance from the mentors, everyone managed to finish a dataset they could call their own.
Day 2 (Nov 7th, 2025)
We switched gears to RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). It’s a bit more technical and can feel dry, but many students stayed focused from start to finish and had great back-and-forth with the speaker. We wrapped the morning with a quick review game – a fun way to recap both days and build some team spirit.
Like Day 1, the afternoon was all about practice to cement what they learned in the morning. There were still a few rough edges, but overall you could see real progress – students were more confident and asked mentors for help less often than on Day 1.
All in all, the two-day session was a success. Huge thanks to Professor Tho, Mr. Quan, and all the mentors for making it happen.
