For Tuan-Viet Nguyen ’11, Servite’s mission to form “faith-filled leaders” was never just a slogan. It was a summons. Raised in a devout Catholic family, he already valued faith and service when he arrived, but at Servite he discovered what it meant to live those values with purpose. Mentors encouraged him, experiences stretched him, and friendships grounded him.

Those early lessons—together with the steady example of his parents—gave him the resilience to face the long road of medical training, the uncertainty of a global pandemic, and the intensity of residency. Looking back, he sees that same partnership between home and school as the foundation that turned instinct into discipline and duty into calling.

He remembers Freshman Formation Weekend, when training alongside Navy SEALs made a big impression. After his freshman year, he quickly joined the Priory Leadership Program (“Go, Hugh!”), serving on the Activities Committee and learning to plan homecoming and formals, run meetings, and collaborate across teams.

“It’s how we carry ourselves, how we speak, the humility with which we treat others regardless of rank or status,” recounts Tuan-Viet on how he learned to lead.

He specifically recalls one moment early on when a coach pulled him aside after a student government speech—an election he didn’t win—and told him it was excellent. The affirmation stuck because it gave voice to what Servite had begun to draw out: leadership as a habit, not a title.

If Servite honed his leadership, Nguyen’s father modeled it. “Dad likes to joke and say that I inherited the leadership genetics from him,” Nguyen says with a smile. Growing up, he often accompanied his father, who was then president of the Vietnamese Catholic community of Orange County, to meetings and parish events. Later, his father would go on to lead the Vietnamese Catholic community for the entire United States and eventually answer a call to the diaconate. “Honestly, everything I learned about leadership was either modeled by my father directly or reinforced by my time at Servite,” Nguyen says. “He showed me that faith and leadership are really the same thing when they’re lived as service.”

Nguyen’s formation wasn’t only organizational; it was spiritual and embodied. Playing tennis at Servite sharpened discipline; Taekwondo took him to a black belt and exposed him to a martial-arts ethos that echoed Servite’s emphasis on brotherhood and responsibility. As a longtime altar server at his parish, he discovered that service near the altar naturally flows outward.

College tested and refined those instincts. At the University of San Diego, Nguyen followed advice to “major in something you love.” He chose classical piano performance, auditioned, won a scholarship, and soon found himself teaching as a TA and conducting the Founders Chapel Choir as a student director. Leadership once again took the shape of service. Though it may have seemed counterintuitive to major in music while completing pre-med requirements, he believes that choice ultimately set him apart as a medical school applicant.

Medical school led him across the Atlantic to an English-language MD program in Poland, and then back home just as COVID-19 struck, which was terrible timing to be seeking a residency program. As an international medical graduate, he found residency doors temporarily closed. The two-year delay could have soured his spirit. Instead, he doubled down on Servite’s playbook: he served. He became a confirmation catechist at St. Columban Parish in Garden Grove, California. He met his fiancée there, too. When he later proposed, he did so at the altar during adoration, with bells unexpectedly ringing, a providential punctuation of a life lived near the Eucharist.

When residency finally opened, Nguyen matched in family medicine at a Northern California program rooted in Christian spirituality. This placement came on the heels of a novena to St. Joseph.

Absorbing all the information that comes at him in the hospital “is like drinking from a firehose,” Nguyen says. During inpatient rotations, the rhythm is what he calls “12 by 12s”—twelve-hour shifts for twelve days straight, followed by a “golden weekend” of two days off, after which the cycle begins again. He begins his day before dawn with prayer and Scripture, continuing the quiet habits of faith that first shaped him at Servite. “Jesus the Divine Physician” remains his model for the kind of healer he strives to be. Nguyen takes the time to explain conditions and treatment options in plain language, teaching at the bedside much as he once taught choirs and undergrads—and patients notice.

Leadership continues to find him. Within the first months of his residency, he was elected class representative for his intern cohort, helping shape schedules, support peers, and mediate the many small issues that determine whether residents merely survive or actually grow and learn. He sees the team hierarchy as a ladder of service: each rung exists to lift the next.

Nguyen’s professional path points toward integrative medicine after residency, via a fellowship that will allow him to honor the healing traditions of his family—his father a chiropractor, relatives in pharmacy and dentistry—while practicing primary care. Long-term, he hopes to return to Orange County, close to both families and the parish life that formed him.

When asked how he stays fully present while still years away from independent practice, Nguyen points to gratitude. After two years of waiting for residency programs to reopen to international medical graduates, he says he no longer views the training as arduous. “This is what I prayed for,” he explains. That sense of thankfulness and the Servite formation that taught him to find purpose in service now shape his every encounter.